https://i.imgur.com/hqrjU7B.jpg

As all of you know, Ripple (XRT) is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, right? Well, I'm not quite sure, let's see why.

Ripple is the third cryptocurrency with the most Market Capitalization according to https://coinmarketcap.com

For those who doesn't know what a Market Capitalization is, well, basically is the whole value of the cryptocurrency as a company, a relationship between the price and the coins out there.

According to www.coinist.io a Market Capitalization:

In crypto, it's defined as the circulating supply of tokens multiplied by current price. If a coin has 100 tokens outstanding and is trading for $10 a coin, it has a market cap of $1000.

As you can see in the image below from https://coinmarketcap.com, the price of a Ripple is absolutely ridiculous if we compare it to Ethereum and bitcoin. A Ripple today is just 1.13$, even STEEM worth more than that with a less Market Capitalization.

https://i.imgur.com/qyFalzx.jpg _{Source: https://coinmarketcap.com Date: 01/31/2018}

Knowing that, how it is possible for Ripple to be so cheap and still be the third cryptocurrency with such a big market capitalization? As you probably guessed, it is because it has a lot of tokens around the world.

Ripple is not considered by experts as a truly cryptocurrency, first at all, because it was made to work for the traditional bank system, and second, because it is not that decentralized.

In Ripple's website you can see this:

Built for enterprise use, XRP offers banks and payment providers a reliable, on-demand option to source liquidity for cross-border payments.

Ripple was created to work with the traditional bank system, to make transactions faster and make payments around the world in just seconds.

Apparently, Ripple has something that no other cryptocurrency has, and that's the traditional bank supporting them, and they can be a great ally in the process of becoming the currency for the world.

Nevertheless, the value of Ripple has never gone up beyond 2$ but this haven't stop the new investors, a lot of people see Ripple as the currency of the future, and because of his low value right now, most of them are buying it like crazy people, despite the fact that the company owns the 60% of all the tokens in the market. The economic strategy of Ripple is quite different from their competitors, the company is trying to make alliances with several companies in the real world, most recently, they have made a deal with MoneyGram to make payments faster, and they already have American Express and some others big companies as their partners.

It will be a bubble o will Ripple become the currency that will merge the traditional bank system with the crypto world? For now, we can just speculate about that because the answer to that question remains into the future.