There are lot of things going in for ripple - With the escrow lockdown to having 100+ customers in its roster, hiring the communications manager from Facebook as head of its advertising unit and rumour that Coinbase will soon support it, all going in favour for the crypto. While the current use case of XRP tokens are limited, it will gain over time as banks get more comfortable with the company, it’s technology and quick processing time. While there will always be haters because of its centralized nature of operations and its dealing with banks, I think both of these are a good in some ways. A strong team with backing of strong VC firms (including Google’s arm) gives me lots of confidence of the long term viability of the project. Lastly banks are where the money is, if they adopt xrp use on a consistent basis even to some degree, this should give Bitcoin a run for its money. I am a hodler.
So.. no one uses it and there are 100,000,000,000 of them, 2/3rds of which are controlled by the issuing authority . At $2.50 thats a market cap of 250 billion. Exxon would be pleased with those numbers.
Let me suggest an altogether simpler reason for the price rise. Noob crypto investors don't understand market cap, they see Ripple at under a dollar and think it can go to $15k like bitcoin, FOMO. This is just a pump, its not going to the moon.
When you say no one uses it, what is your source of information? They have 3 products in their portfolio, out of which 1 solely utilizes XRP tokens.
Also, I don’t think tokens which are not in the escrow is the right way to look at the market cap. If you drain the market with too much supply, the XRP price will plummet, which is why the escrow exists fundamentally.
Lastly, $15k is bullshit. I don’t think it makes sense. However, I would also not compare a decentralized currency with the market cap of a centralized corporation. If that’s the argument, nothing in the crypto space would make sense. The idea is to ride the boom till it lasts, de-risk your investments as and when possible and earn a better return than other avenues available for investments. Hope it make sense.
Ripple is just Swift or Visa masquerading as cryptocurrency. If you can make money out of it great, but as a concept Ripple is not what crypto is about IMHO.