Investing.com – Ripple moved above $1.8 for the first time in its five-year history amid reports of growing interest in the cryptocurrency’s technology.
Ripple XRP rose 40.79% to $1.75 on the Polinex exchange following recent reports that Tokyo-based financial services company SBI Holdings and its subsidiary SBI Ripple Asia plan to use Ripple’s digital payments technology. Ripple XRP rose to an all-time high of $1.818 earlier in the session.
Ripple simplifies the way financial institutions like banks process their customers’ payments around the world.
“Ripple connects banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges via RippleNet to provide one frictionless experience to send money globally,” A recent McKinsey study noted.
The native currency of Ripple is XRP – and there’s a finite amount of XRP in existence.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, added to gains but sentiment on the popular digital currency has soured in recent days, as investors questioned whether bitcoin’s failure to sustain a move higher above a psychological $16,000 level pointed to weak demand.
On the Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $14,568, up $1032, or 7.62%, after recently hitting an all-time high of $19,891.
Also weighing on bitcoin were signs of growing regulatory pressure in the industry after the South Korean government proposed legislation to prohibit companies from providing settlement services for cryptocurrency transactions. This comes just days after Israel Securities Authority chairman Shmuel Hauser he will propose regulation to ban companies based on bitcoin and other digital currencies from trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Despite the year-end blip in bitcoin, the popular digital currency boasts a return of more than 1400% since the start of the year, dwarfing the returns of the traditional benchmarks like the S&P 500.
Bitcoin cash rose 9.42% to $2589.9, after surging above $4000 to a record high of $4,100 last week. Bitcoin Cash was created in August following a split in Bitcoin’s blockchain – the digital ledger which records every bitcoin transaction – in an event know as a ‘hard fork’.
Litecoin, meanwhile, fell 2.14%% to $246. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rose 8.44% to $735.49, well below its recent peak of $863 set last week.