From decrypt by Logan Hitchcock
The excitement surrounding Ripple and XRP has been growing since Donald Trump became President-elect in November, signaling a potentially favorable administration for crypto assets.
That excitement crescendoed last week as XRP came within pennies of breaking its all-time high price record from 2018, pushing Ripple’s stash of the asset to a staggering sum amid other notable happenings around the crypto company.
Here’s what you need to know from a wild week for Ripple and XRP.
XRP traded around $0.50 in the days leading up to the U.S. elections in November. Since that time the token has grown by more than 500% to a current price of $3.15, all while becoming the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, overtaking stablecoin Tether in the process.
Thanks to the surge, the token nearly set a new all-time high, peaking at $3.38 on January 16, just $0.02 shy of its all-time high of $3.40 set in 2018 per data from CoinGecko.
Up more than 25% on the week as of this writing, XRP has greatly outperformed its major crypto peers like Bitcoin and Ethereum—though Solana is now showing much larger weekly gains thanks to momentum around Trump’s official meme coin launch.
Some of the demand for XRP can be attributed to the growing optimism about an approval of an XRP ETF. Last week, a report from researchers at JP Morgan indicated that if approved, an XRP ETF could expect to pull in billions of dollars from investors.
This report piggybacks on recent comments from Ripple Labs president Monica Long, who suggested that she thinks an XRP ETF will be approved “very soon.”
The major price appreciation in XRP has bolstered Ripple’s holdings tremendously, increasing by about $115 billion since election day at the current price
Based on its most recent financial disclosures, the firm holds around 4.44 billion XRP, and controls another 39 billion XRP in escrow—a collective amount now worth $136 billion at the token’s current price. At the time of the election, this amount was worth approximately $21 billion.