I think there has been a lot of good news, which has attracted speculators, and speculators have then attracted more speculators...

A lot can be argued in favor of XRP as an investment, but I am most interested in the merits of the Ripple protocol in isolation from XRP exchange value.

Ripple has a highly engaged community, surrounding a widely misunderstood crypto protocol and network, and that is my general message. I am most excited by the new investment interest attracting new contributors to the ecosystem.

Success of any cryptocurrency, in general, is almost religiously associated with a high exchange value. If Bitcoin continues to incrementally improve, as necessary for scale, dropped to $10 on the exchanges, and then became widely adopted---it would be hard to say that the protocol was not successful. I am not sure why Bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency, needs to trade at $10K for it to be considered a success. And this is also true of Ripple. Adoption is key, in my opinion, and it is cool seeing Ripple continue to gain traction---as well as all of the continual improvements being made to the code base.

I hold XRP as a long term investment, and do not encourage anyone to invest in any cryptocurrency without taking the time to research and understand it. Even then, investment in any cryptocurrency remains high risk.

I think the greatest odds of making money from any cryptocurrency is through building something uniquely useful on top of it, and something useful for people beyond its core community. In general, I also think that will be the winning path to ubiquitous cryptocurrency adoption. Ripple is highly oriented toward utility.

If you are a dev or entrepreneur, check out the CrossCoin startup accelerator linked in my sig. Ripple has opportunity for profit beyond XRP, and the accelerator can help get you rolling.

xrptalk.org is a useful forum for anyone wanting to understand more about Ripple---its community voice is underrepresented here.