Here’s Why Ripple (XRP) Could Be More Important Than Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is riding high this week but it’s far from the only cryptocurrency to be gaining strength. A number of so-called competitors to bitcoin – Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, etc. – have been running and, in many cases, these runs are strongly justified.

One that we like in particular is Ripple.

Here’s a look at the action in Ripple of late with a discussion as to where we see the company and its representative token going near term.

This is one of the most commonly misunderstood cryptocurrencies on the market today. For all intents and purposes, and at a glance, Ripple looks very similar in terms of construction and set up to bitcoin and Litecoin. Ask somebody why Ripple is required when these latter two already exist and you’ll probably see that person struggle to muster up any substantial response.

Common perception, in other words, doesn’t do Ripple justice.

In reality, Ripple has the potential to be one of the most game-changing tokens on the market. Sure, it’s similar to bitcoin in that it’s designed as a means of exchange but, implementation, it’s completely different.

Ripple Chart

Ripple is designed to facilitate cross-party exchange. That’s its primary use case. Say a bank wants to send somebody to another bank from one currency to another, Ripple can serve as an intermediary for this exchange. The first bank converts its USD in XRP (the unit of exchange associated with Ripple) and the second bank converts the XRP that it receives into EUR.

Sure, this can be achieved with bitcoin but, because bitcoin transactions require verification through the mining process, said verification can take a considerable amount of time – 10 minutes, 30 minutes etc.

With Ripple, the transaction verification is done in-house (by Ripple) so that the process takes seconds.

This makes it a far more efficient transaction method and it’s why Ripple has served as the basis of a large number of experiments with banks and various other financial institutions in the cryptocurrency sector.

So what’s happening at the moment with XRP?

Well, XRP is actually down against both BTC and the USD over the last twenty-four hours or so but, when you extend this to a year to date timeframe, XRP rises more than 3,500% against the dollar.

This run is representative of a cryptocurrency that’s slowly but steadily gaining traction in the market based on the fact that it’s got a very specific use case – something that coins like bitcoin and Litecoin don’t really have.

To put all this another way – banks hate bitcoin but the same banks love Ripple. That’s going to help XRP considerably in the long term as the traditional financial entities push to adopt cryptocurrency-type technology against a backdrop of the necessity for innovation.

The current XRP price (against the USD, this one’s trading for about $0.25 right now) may be down on the last twenty-four hours, then, or even the last 30 days, but any dip could be a great opportunity to pick up an exposure to the coin in anticipation of the sort of wide-scale integration of the Ripple protocol into the current mainstream that we expect long-term.

There’s also an ongoing (and very convincing) campaign to get XRP on Coinbase. If this happens, and there’s a chance it might early next year, it’s going to serve as an immediate upside catalyst for the coin on announcement.

Keep in mind that there’s a good chance we’re going to see some real volatility as the price of bitcoin continues to dominate sentiment in this sector and we’re likely in store for a steep correction at some point over the next few months.

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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.