The astonishing rise of Ripple continues
Ripple is up another 34% today and trading at $3.80.
It's been an astonishing rise. Just in the pat month it's up 14-fold and 300-fold in the past year. Since the turn of the year, it's already up 65%.
The bulk of the rally came after several financial institutions -- particularly in Japan and South Korea -- showed interest in adopting its technology to replace the SWIFT money transfer system.
At this point, it would have to take over the SWIFT system and jack up the fees to justify the valuation.
The coins in circulation are now worth $144 billion, trailing only Bitcoin at $244 billion. However, only about 38% of the coins are in circulation. The rest are held privately by Ripple Labs, which created the coin.
If you include those, Ripple is easily the most-valuable cryptocurrency. In fact, it's one of the most-valuable companies in the world. According to Mike Novogratz, including the uncirculated coins owned by Ripple Labs, that company is worth $225 billion. That would make it the 10th most-valuable company in the world -- bigger than Wal-Mart, Visa or Coca-Cola.
By that metric, CEO Chris Larsen is worth $55 billion, making him the 8th-richest person in the world, just ahead of Google CEO Larry Page.
