Why Ripple’s price is going up right now

The altcoin has gone up over 50% in 24 hours to become the second biggest cryptocurrency, taking over from Ethereum.

Over the last 24 hours Ripple's XRP price has gone through the roof, hitting over US$2 for the first time and reaching US$2.50 temporarily.

As a result, Ripple's market cap is now sitting at US$95 billion, over US$20 billion more than the market cap of Ethereum, making it the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market value.

Since the beginning of the year, Ripple has grown a huge 28,000% as it gets more banks and financial institutions onto its platform.

What's causing the price to rise so fast?

Ripple was one of the only major cryptocurrencies to not take a big hit over the Christmas period, quadrupling the week before 22 December while the likes of BTC and ETH were crashing up to 30%.

It’s believed a lot of this is due to its popularity in Asia. Ripple's joint venture with Japanese financial institution SBI, SBI Ripple Asia, was announced earlier this week, and it's exploring how it can use the technology in card payments across Asia.

This venture has been responsible for several big partnerships in the region, with over 75 companies now supporting the technology.

In the USA Ripple announced in late November a partnership with American Express, opening up American Express’ business customers to route payments through Ripple’s blockchain network. Ripple says XRP will be used with American Express to speed up payments “later on”.

These types of partnerships have given a legitimacy to Ripple, tying the value of the XRP token to Ripple’s performance as a company, rather than others such as Bitcoin which is based on pure speculation.

Earlier this month Ripple hired Facebook's communication manager, Tom Channick, adding another strong name to the company's growing team.

Hedge funds are also getting in on Ripple, with tech figure Michael Arrington announcing a new US$100 million fund at the end of November that will be denominated in Ripple XRP.