Ripple has a big potential with it's developer and investor, they love to start a bull run periodically then smash it like nothing. If you can catch that "ripple" on it's start you can gain 10x-15x but if you be late you can lose a lot, it is risky but if you look at yearly graph it is about time and today's rise seems like a signal. 
Ripple is going to... go nowhere.
That is my personal opinion because Ripple is too centralized for me. No other way to mine or mint Ripple except when they are manually created by the Ripple team for their friends and relatives (speculation). There is simply just too much going on with Ripple behind the scenes to really trust it like a real public blockchain.