Ripple has been making headlines for the past few weeks and is still making a push for the number two spot on the top 100 cryptocurrencies according to CoinMarketCap. In the last month, it took over for a short time but slunk back into the third spot on the chart.

The coin and its company haven't’ been out of the limelight for a while now, in fact, in the last few weeks, we have seen more news of Ripple than we have over the course of the whole year.

Some of this publicity was due to its own promotion - one of the biggest was the Swell Conference which showed the ex-president Bill Clinton makes an appearance as the keynote speaker. Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO spoke on the major news release of their latest venture, xRapid and the first three customers, Cuallix, MercuryFX and Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union.

xRapid will allow businesses to use Ripple’s coin XRP as a kind of bridge to make cross-border payments viable using the Ripple system. There are hundreds of partnerships that Ripple is involved in but most of these have products which don’t have anything to do with the actual XRP coin which is a real step in making sure the asset holds real value.

With the Ripple Foundation and xRapid, we seem to find the ideology of the blockchain come to light. However, this is more than can be said for thousands of projects in the crypto space which have failed, some are even doing so after raising millions in an ICO.

However, with Bitcoin stuck in the adoption phase and Ethereum working out how to design its tech to become reality, Ripple might be taking the biggest steps the world sees to blockchain integration in such a huge format.

Nevertheless, there is still a divide between Ripple Foundation, the technology behind it and the XRP cryptocurrency which is currently its flagship.

An author over at Seeking Alpha has said this on the matter:

“I believe Ripple's success will showcase the power of blockchain; helping to boost investor interest in the industry at large. I also think that Ripple's success will lead to short-term gains for XRP holders. But long-term? There are several indicators that XRP will not be the investment opportunity that other coins could be; or that Ripple's success might not translate well to shareholder value.”

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

References:

Seeking Alpha