RIPPLE MANIA CONTINUES AS IT ROARS PAST $3.5 TO MAKE A NEW RECORD-HIGH

There is a huge spurt of investors in buying Ripple (XRP) tokens as the cryptocurrency has appreciated more than 65% since the start of 2018.
As bitcoin continues to consolidate around $14000 levels, Ripple is currently calling the shots in the crypto markets and has emerged as the hot pick for cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors. In the past 24 hours, Ripple has surged past $3.5 to hit a new all-time of $3.84 as the altcoin surges by more than 43%.

A huge spurt of investors to buy Ripple XRP tokens is pushing the cryptocurrency to new highs. Since the start of 2018, Ripple has appreciated by more than 65% in just four days. The latest price rise in the last 24-hours can possibly be because of the revelation that Arrington XRP Capital, a $100 million crypto-asset hedge fund has gone live. This hedge fund has been launched by TechCrunch founder – Michael Arrington who yesterday announced the fund going live through a tweet: “https://twitter.com/arrington/status/948413597268373505”

This is the first-of-its-kind crypto hedge fund to be denominated in XRP. Arrington has said that investors are allowed to buy shares of the fund as they receive distributions in XRP.

Ripple Technology, the startup behind creating XRP, is working with several banks and financial institutions in providing blockchain-based solutions for faster global transactions achieved at a much lower cost. The XRP tokens just act as a bridge between the fiat transactions. As per Ripple, the cross-border transactions can take less than four seconds which currently takes two-three days to process.

The rally in Ripple prices started last month in Dec. 2017 when the Japanese and South Korean banks announced testing the Ripple technology. In addition, Japan’s SBI Holdings in a joint partnership with Ripple has announced the formation of a “consortium” with several credit-card companies for using the Ripple technology.

Sean Walsh, a partner in venture-capital firm Redwood City Ventures attributed this surge to several events and announcements in the recent time. Walsh said: “This price move appears to be a continuation of December’s XRP gains in response to the double benefits of their followthrough on their 55 billion XRP escrow commitment, and the AMEX/Santander/XRP partnership announced in November. Further, the recent XRP news cycle has been overwhelmingly positive which certainly has a way of gaining its own momentum.”

There has been a huge buying interest as demand for Ripple continues to grow at the exchanges. There is a rumour out there that the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange – Coinbase could soon add Ripple to its platform. On the other hand, looking to the crazy demand of Ripple, Canadian exchange ‘Coinsquare’ has announced to add Ripple to its website in near future.

Coinsquare CEO Cole Diamond said “We’re going to be adding Ripple, we’re going to be adding Monero. We’re going to be adding other digital currencies that have their own blockchains and never did ICOs (initial coin offerings) – with the exception of Ethereum,” during his television interview with Business News Network (BNN).