Ripple has managed to impress investors and the cryptocurrency market, becoming the second most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin. Without a doubt, the development of Ripple in the past few weeks, and mostly in the past 24 hours, has been a very interesting one for investors.

In the past 24 hours, the price of Ripple has increased by more than 25% and is currently valued at $3.52. The market cap of the digital currency has reached more than $136 billion, thus now Ripple is on the second place behind bitcoin when it comes to the cryptocurrency market.

Ripple managed to overpass Ethereum

Without a doubt, it seems that Ripple has managed to take the second place from Ethereum, which is definitely quite unexpected. A couple of weeks ago, Ethereum was one of the best situated cryptocurrencies on the market. In fact, this digital currency has been the number two cryptocurrency for months.

Ethereum was considered to be the main rival of bitcoin on the market, but it has surely lost this position now. Coinmarketcap indicated that Ripple has overtaken that role from Ethereum and is now the major threat to bitcoin.

What led to Ripple's price increase?

For the moment, it is unclear what determined the growth of Ripple's price and market cap, but this cryptocurrency has received a lot of interest from new hedge funds lately and this might be a good explanation.

An even more interesting thing about the evolution of Ripple is linked to the fact that this is quite a different cryptocurrency from bitcoin, for instance. Ripple is not created by a decentralized mining process. It was actually created in a single swoop and the company holds a very important amount of the stock.

Well, despite the success of Ripple, not everyone seemed happy with this growth. In fact, some social media users actually claimed that Ripple is not even a real cryptocurrency.