There a chance of Ripple reaching $5 this year because the financial industy is warming up towards Ripple.
Ripple is making headway and gaining ground on their competition who are outside the cryptocurrency world. This should be their main goal, gaining ground on the traditional financial firms since other virtual currencies do not pose any major threat to their business model. Western Union and MoneyGram are a couple of the money transfer companies that are warming up to Ripple with the adoption of XRP. This partnership is still in the early stages but if it happens XRP will increases their profits margins and efficiency of money transfers for these companies; it will only be natural that more banks and money order firms in the financial industry will begin to accept XRP into their systems. If this happens, the demand for XRP digital coins will skryrocket