XRP - Why isn't it at $1...$2....$5 yet??

By Phil Skinner | Altcoins for HODL | 7 Jan 2020

XRP is arguably the most popular altcoin to HODL. There has been a whole host of incredibly promising and exciting news from the Ripple team over the past few years such as:

Significant financial institution customers using RippleNet - American Express, Moneygram, Santander
Over 350 employees and growing, in multiple locations across the world
Xpring developer platform

Why haven't these caused enormous amounts of growth?

As we have seen, XRP doesn't seem to react positively to Ripple related landmarks and achievements, but instead follows the general crypto trends, in particular Bitcoin.

XRP enthusiasts and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse are certain that this won't continue indefinitely, but of course they would say that!

XRP cynics, market makers and competitor payment systems aren't so sure, with some predicting drops to $0.10 and then fading away...

The most key part of information is the XRP isn't critical for RippleNet. This means that some of these huge customers aren't required to own, hold, buy and sell XRP to utilise RippleNet. So why would they?

They could start utilising the On-demand liquidity service, which is a cost and time saving international payment method that Moneygram do use. Their use-case in my opinion here mainly benefits larger global organisations working in emerging markets.

This would affect XRP price positively.

Could more customers use ODL as RippleNet continues to expand? Quite possibly.

This video from Ripple posted on 26th December on their site talks about their own predicitions for 2020 and beyond:

Something that stood out for me when watching this was Brad Garlinghouse talking about the reduction of the amount of cryptocurrencies from the thousands to the hundreds.

I agree that there will start to be a purge of less useful cryptocurrencies, especially in the first two years of the 20s. The imminent global financial recession will limit investors and some coins will die out as a result. Other coins will benefit in nuclear-like explosive ways!! However, I do also see a great amount of new projects being launched also.

If the purge outstrips the new coins, there will be less choice for investments and increases in prices across the board. I would bet that those investors burned in projects that collapsed and lost their money, will look to long standing, proven and safer options for their crypto specifically BTC, ETH and XRP.

Another reason the price hasn't reached $2,5,10 or more yet is due to mis-conception on adoption. Asheesh Birla make this point very well in the video. Bitcoin took 6 years to go from a few pence to their high of around $20,000. Ripple is 7 years old and because it has been so closely related to Bitcoin, it was almost expected that XRP would be in double digit dollar amounts by now. It has been considered a failure by many just because it is not here yet.

These things take time and depending on the industry that a particular blockchain is trying to evolve. If you look at Enjin coin (ENJ) and the gaming industry, this is pre-built ready to go for blockchain technology and price impact, positive or negative depending on adoption, could happen in 2-3 years. The DeFi and payment space has so many players that is was inevitable that it would take a long time to have an real-world impact. This is true for Stellar Lumens (XLM) and other payment utility tokens.

For me, Breanne Madigan from the video makes a very sensible point. it's going to take approx. 5 years for a significant number of financial institutions to become more aggressive with using blockchain technology.