Ripple's Race
Ripple’s XRP is one of those few altcoins which shot to the moon but even after the crash held their positions in terms of rankings on the Coin Market Cap. Sitting idle for 4 years till April’17, the coin has constantly been amidst controversies and partnerships.
2 quarters into the year 2018, let’s have a look at what favours XRP and what doesn’t.
Focussing on the bright side first, let’s list those things that’ll help XRP to shoot to the moon again:
Ripple has had many partnerships with banks which offer legitimacy to the company itself. It’s most successful partnership with Santander Bank. The bank which has now confirmed that it uses Ripple’s xCurrent for 50 percent of its international transfers.
SBI Holdings in Japan launched a cryptocurrency exchange listing Ripple’s XRP as the only coin with plans to add more coins in the future. Currently the exchange is live for first 20000 members only but when it goes live to the full public we may see a likely rise in the coin.
Partnerships with Moneygram and WesternUnion to test xCurrent further strengthens the faith in Ripple’s community.
Over a 100 banks (List: http://rppl.info/) have partnered with Ripple, making it the only company taking head on with The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
Ripple has also decided to re-launch the age old project Codius which directly takes on Ethereum when it realises its full potential. According to Codius:
“Codius is an open hosting protocol. It makes it very easy to upload a program, whether you want it to run on one host or thousands. It also has built-in billing. That means once a program is uploaded, anyone can pay to keep it running — the author, the users and even the program itself.”
Ripple knows how to stay in news with its recent series of charity donations of up to $50 million to top schools to focus more on Blockchain.
American Express is the latest and also one of the biggest financial services company to consider Ripple for payments using its xCurrent.
As a coin XRP’s performance is great with 10,000 transactions per second and very low transaction fees. Something that only a few coins have been able to manage.
NBAD, the largest bank in UAE, uses Ripple’s public blockchain for transactions.
Moving on to things that hinder XRP’s growth:
Ripple’s legal battle with R3 has been a consistent obstacle with no clear winner on either sides.
Cryptoenthusiasts are usually reluctant about cryptocurrencies that are pre mined. In case of XRP, the company holds 55 Billion XRPs in an escrow account, making it highly centralised in nature even when the consensus ledger is open and not closed.
Ripple’s main focus is banks, making it the only company running towards centralised institutions in a crypto world that focuses on decentralisation
xCurrent does not use XRP tokens only xRapid does and most of the bank partnerships Ripple has acquired are using xCurrent and not xRapid.
Excessive number of tokens: 100 billion XRP is one reason why XRP cannot easily shoot to the overhyped $10 mark people predicted for 2018. For this to happen, the market cap of XRP will have to rise to enormous amounts.
Direct competition with Stellar Lumens (XLM). XLM is everything that XRP is minus the centralised nature. Stellar also doesn’t have any controversy surrounding it. In fact, IBM currently uses a few Stellar nodes for internal transactions.
The Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) considers XRP to be a security, making it hard for Ripple to get CoinBase to list XRP on its exchange. Ripple continues to chase the exchanges in the US to get XRP listed.
Direct Correlation with BTC prices: Like almost all altcoins, the movement of XRP, whether bearish or bullish, depends on the fluctuations in BTC prices.
After considering everything, Ripple’s XRP still holds a very important position in the crypto space and has a very strong community backing it. Only once the cryptocurrency space matures, one can eliminate the grey areas surrounding Ripple’s XRP.