The global cryptocurrency market is having one of its best weeks in recent times and has put on a gain of approximately 25% since this time last week.
This added an additional US$62 billion to its combined market value, taking it up to US$311.15 billion this morning according to Coin Market Cap.
The majority of these gains were made overnight when the bitcoin (BTC) price surged higher. It is up 13% over the last 24 hours to US$7,843.77 per coin, increasing its market capitalisation to US$131.15 billion.
Experts believe that bitcoin surged after a push higher led to a short squeeze. As I mentioned earlier today, Nick Kirk from Cypher Capital told CNBC that: "The ratio of short margin trades versus longs has been increasing recently. Buying volume ticked up today and a lot of these short trades got liquidated, helping fuel the rally."
While bitcoin's gain was impressively strong, it wasn't the biggest being made by the major coins.
That honour went to the Ripple (XRP) price. At the time of writing the popular altcoin is up just under 16% since this time yesterday to 61.2 U.S. cents. This lifted its market capitalisation to US$23.95 billion.
Why is Ripple rocketing higher?
Traders have been snapping up Ripple's XRP after it emerged that European banking giant Santander has launched a blockchain-based foreign exchange service that uses Ripple's technology to make same-day international money transfers.
According to CNBC, the Santander One Pay FX platform is currently live in four different countries (Spain, the U.K., Brazil and Poland), with a wider roll-out expected in the coming months.
What's next?
Santander is just one of a number of financial institutions looking to Ripple's technology to bring financial services into the digital age. As more deals are announced in the future, I suspect they could lend support to the XRP price.
Though, ultimately, trader sentiment is likely to have the biggest impact on the future direction of XRP. Sentiment certainly appears strong at the moment but, as we have seen many times before, things can change very quickly in the cryptocurrency world.
