Ripple is a fake market cap. Can anyone actually say how many XRP's are in real circulation? Just because I create 100 billion coins doesn't mean I actually gave anyone any. I can give out 100 and keep the price inflated to 2 dollars forever and my marketcap would show almost 3 times as much as XRP's.
Just beware.. the XRP folks can throw another few billion into the mix and boom.. price crash. They are just waiting for enough suckers to get in to cash out.
Ripple built 55 smart contracts using its own escrow feature released for public used in March, each holding 1 billion XRP and expiring on the first day of every month for a period of 54 months.
As each contract expires, the cryptocurrency will briefly become available for Ripple to use as it sees fit.
That's right, and it's exactly the reason I didn't buy XRP. The whole thing makes you a slave to the bankers who can monitor, freeze, and reverse transactions, and artificially change prices.
The only thing that makes it not as bad as the Fed is that at least it can't "print" XRPs. But that's not saying much.
Nevertheless, you have to admit that XRP has a lot of banking partnerships, and people want that. A lot of people don't care about decentralization - these days it's just about the money.
**This is not a problem though**. XRP and BTC and ETH do not have to be competitors. They are actually quite different. Just because there is banking functionality does not mean that BTC and ETH is obsolete - obviously.
The only problem, which is artificial, is that money moved from BTC to XRP. However, when new money comes in (like it is right now) then we will see them go up in tandem.