XRP has just surpassed its arch-rival, Polkadot, amid strong buying pressure from an army of relatively young traders on Reddit.
XRP now has a market value of about $22 billion, while Polkadot, an open-source multichain protocol that enables the cross-chain transfer of any data or asset type, had a market value of $14.6 billion.
READ: Top 5 richest people gain over $200 billion in 365 days
XRP gained over 120% in two days, as the fourth-most valuable crypto by market value became the new coin of focus from a new brand of retail traders known as WallStreetBets.
- XRP traded at $0.483947 with a daily trading volume of $23,175,166,863. It is up 13.23% for the day.
- Recall that XRP is facing a serious legal tussle with America’s leading financial regulator, and this has caused many crypto exchanges including Coinbase to delist XRP.
- Such has led to its market value subsequently plummeting by 63%, in a crash that proved disastrous for many investors.
READ: List of Cryptos outperforming Bitcoin, with weekly gains of over 100%
Meanwhile, leading crypto-payment based company, Ripple, creator of the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization, recently unlocked 1 billion XRP, worth $477.7 million, from an escrow account in two tranches.
“500,000,000 XRP (238,886,002 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet.”
🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 500,000,000 #XRP (238,886,002 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 1, 2021
“500,000,000 XRP (238,886,002 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet.”
🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 500,000,000 #XRP (238,886,002 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 1, 2021
READ: Ripple takes back 800 million XRP
Ripple owns more than half of the total supply of XRP. In late 2017, the company vowed not to sell all of its tokens (XRP) at once, keeping up to 55 billion XRP in protected escrow accounts.
It then set up a plan to release about 1,000,000,000 XRP monthly for sale to be used as funding for its operations, and to invest in startups of interest, with the rest kept back in the escrow accounts.
What this means: In simple terms, the implication of this is more liquidity in the Ripple network, as more investors will now have access to XRP.
Ripple (XRP) plays a dual role as a payment platform and a currency. It is an open-source platform that is created to allow quick and cheap transactions.
