Cryptocurrency news: Ripple XRP price set to SOAR after new deals signed

XRP Ripple has been tipped as the “dark horse of 2018” with its value set to soar if the firm signs more deals with major financial companies, despite being embroiled in a bitter court case and having to overcome progress in regulation laws.

The cryptocurrency is the only one in the top-five to have had a positive trend this week since it started trading.

The currency’s value increased in the run-up to December and the first half of January, but it still has quite a lot of potential for future growth, Bitcoinist reports.

Ripple’s advantage over other currencies is its near-instant international payments, which are processed in just 10 -15 seconds.

In the SWIFT system it can take up to 3 days.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview with NBC: “The reason why XRP is unique is, it settles in three seconds so I’m not taking risks on kind of volatilities, where bitcoin takes hours.

“We are a thousand times faster than bitcoin and a thousand times cheaper the bitcoin to settle a transaction.”

Last week the Ripple team completed two new partnership agreements.

The first was with the telecom company IDT and the second was with international payment service MercuryFX.

Ripple will also test the functionality of xRapid Ripple, based on the Ripple token (XRP), which has been designed to lower commissions when making payments.

In early January the international payment system Moneygram announced plans to add the XRP token to increase speed and lower commissions.

Ripple is still facing challenges despite its progress, as rapid growth is being held back by an ongoing court case with the R3 banking consortium.

The dispute centres around a deal that was signed for R3 to buy 5 billion tokens when they had an extremely low value.

The contract is now worth $12billion and Ripple have a filed a claim stating the deal was made in bad faith.

Ripple’s filing states that it does not need to honour the contract because the consortium failed to hold up its end of the deal to sign them up with a bank, and that R3 used the partnership to leech expertise and develop a competing product.

Ripple is also facing blockchain-based competition that is said to be showing no sign of relenting.

The third obstacle Ripple is facing is progress around regulations for cryptocurrencies.

Ripple was fined $700,000 for violating bank secrecy laws related to money laundering prevention.

Despite that, Ripple’s value will increase if the currency strikes another agreement with a major financial company.

It is possible the currency’s value could return to above the three-dollar mark within the next few weeks, according to Bitcoinist.

Its price has stalled around $0.85 and may be preparing for another huge sell-off.