ACHIEVEMENT

• The price of ethereum hit an all-time high solidified its position as the second most worthy cryptocurrency of $1,349.25 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk.
• The cryptocurrency's price is up around 60 %t in the last week.
• Steven Nerayoff, a co-creator of ethereum, said it could "easily" double or triple this year.
• Ripple (XRP) is still staggering $60 billion within a five-day period.

THE PRICE of Ripple has decreased about 40% since opening on Monday with its competitive Ethereum racing ahead to become the world's second-biggest cryptocurrency. Here are the latest news and value updates.

Real Time Stats

Now: $1,349.25
High: 4.03%
Today's Open: $1,297.03
Today's High: $1,417.38
Today's Low: $1,263.30
Change: $52.22
Market Cap: $0.131T
Supply: 96,891,070

Ether Benefits VS Ripple’s Downfall

Since January 4, the market estimate of Ripple
fallen from $148 billion to $73 billion, falling by nearly 2-fold in a single week. On the contrary, the market judgment of Ethereum surged from $85 billion to$135 billion, recording yet another 15% increase in value today, onJanuary 10.

The recent wave in the price of Ethereum can be widely attributed to the sell-off of XRP, which was likely triggered by the market’s interests over the unexpected spike in the market estimate of Ripple. The harsh crit*icism of Ripple by analysts such as ConsenSys entrepreneur-in-residence Ryan Selkis could also have led to the decline in confidence towards Ripple.

On December 29, Selkis noted that the majority of Ripple’s partner banks are not actually utilizing the Ripple network to process billionsof dollars on a regular basis. Given that the transaction volume of Ripple and its network of banks can be just two factors that could maybe explain its market cap, the market’s attention to Ripple decreased in the very short-term.

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Ryan Selkis Wrote:

“Per a source at one of the major banks re XRP: ‘I know of no banks that are a) using it, or b) would touch it in any way as it is controlled by a SV company and 20% of all XRP in existence were taken by the founders.

The product that Ripple is offering to banks is simply a point-to-point messaging tool with some smart cryptography underneath to ensure that transactions are atomic. The liquidity model used is the same as correspondent banking.”

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In response to the criticism of Selkis and Nathaniel Poppers of The New York Times that banks are not using theRipple network to achieve high amounts of transactions, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse firmly stated that there are several banks daily using the xRapid platform of Ripple to process payments at ahigh-scale.

“Over the last few months, I’ve talked with actual banks and payment providers. They are indeed planning to use xRapid (our XRP liquidity product) in a serious way. This is a sampling of what I heard:

1. We ran the costs on our end, and see that this is 100% more effective than what we’re doing now.
2. The xRapid pilots all went correctly.
3. This is much more effective than our method today. We’d like to move forward with xRapid today.
4. This [XRP] is a much more powerful way to send money across lines than what we typically use today.
5. There are lots of small to medium-sized banks out there that are hit difficult by fees. They would jump at the opportunity to send money immediately and bypass those fees.”

Still, regardless of the statement of Garlinghouse, the value of Ripple has dropped drastically over the past week and as an outgrowth, Ethereum has benefited from the variation in interest from XRP to the rest of the cryptocurrency market.

Ethereum’s Market Cap Can be Justified

Ethereum continues as one of the several blockchain networks that have a defensible market valuation. Decentralized applications architecture on top of Ethereum such as CryptoKitties, 0x, EtherDelta, Status, and OmiseGo have acquired a huge amount of user base of actual users that process hundreds of thousands of transactions on a daily basis.

In the short-term, it is likely that the upward price trend of Ether will continue, as decentralized applications on the network perform well.

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