The Ripple price, which many investors claimed could not increase further after reaching $3, has demonstrated yet another 33.8 percent surge over the past 24 hours, as the market valuation of Ripple surpassed $141 billion.

Meteoric Rise

Over the past seven days, the market valuation of Ripple has risen from $52 billion to $141 billion, by nearly three-fold.

Ryan Shea, a highly respected bitcoin developer and the co-founder of Blockstack, revealed that the “implied” market cap of Ripple, or the market valuation of the Ripple network based on the maximum supply of XRP, has surpassed bitcoin.

Here’s how logical crypto markets are – Ripple’s fully diluted market cap is now larger than Bitcoin’s, and Stellar’s is nearly tied with Ethereum’s pic.twitter.com/VZjdUx7diL — Ryan Shea (@ryaneshea) January 4, 2018

A specific event or a partnership had not pushed the price of XRP up over the past few days. Rather, the meteoric rise in the value of Ripple has led to a flurry of mainstream media reports, introducing Ripple to an entirely new consumer base and group of investors.

While analysts such as cryptocurrency fund Autonomous Partners founder and managing director Arianna Simpson believe that the price of Ripple will not increase further at this value, many still predict the market valuation of Ripple to be sustained due to the increasing awareness of the blockchain network from Wall Street and investors in the traditional finance sector.

Simpson said:

“Ripple is not at all decentralized. It is actually the antithesis of decentralization. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the price continue to rise because I know that the team has a number of community and marketing initiatives in Q1 and Q2. I think a lot of that will drive interest. I also think the fact that XRP is now on Bloomberg terminals will drive a lot of awareness and interest from Wall Street and traditional financial players.”

Conditional Valuation

Over the past week, most of the interest towards Ripple has come from the South Korean and Japanese cryptocurrency markets, triggered by the partnership between SBI Ripple Asia and major Asian banks. Within the first quarter of 2018, more than 90 Japanese and South Korean banks are expected to utilize the Ripple blockchain technology at a large commercial scale, processing many billions of dollars on the network.

It can also be said that the current market valuation of Ripple is conditional in the abovementioned accomplishment. If banks struggle or fail to implement the Ripple network at a commercial scale and use it to process real transaction volumes, the market valuation of Ripple could sharply drop.

In contrast, if the tests and commercialization of the Ripple network by leading banks in Japan and South Korea are completed seamlessly by the end of quarter 1 in 2018, the price of Ripple also could increase. Because of this condition, analysts are cautious in providing predictions for the price of XRP.

Still, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange market accounts for more than 40 percent of Ripple’s global trades, even though the daily trading volume of Ripple has increased to $8 billion, significantly higher than that of Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. It has also achieved 50 percent of bitcoin’s market valuation, becoming the second cryptocurrency to do so over the past 12 months apart from Ethereum.

Featured image from Shutterstock.