While 2017 clearly belonged to Bitcoin, 2018 may well be the year of Ripple -- another cryptocurrency which has surged in the past few weeks.
Ripple has outpaced the growth of Bitcoin and Ethereum towards the end of last year, making sure its co-founder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen became one of the five richest people in America right now. Yeah, that's right.
Man of the moment (courtesy - TIME)
Chris Larsen, the co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple, has 5.19 billion of the company's digital coin?XRP. Not only that but he holds?a 17 percent stake in the company,?according to Forbes. XRP recently hit an all-time high of $3.84 per coin yesterday, ensuring Larsen's holdings were worth $59.9 billion at end of day's trading yesterday.
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This has ensured Chris Larsen pulling ahead of Silicon Valley stalwarts with respect to the size of their bank accounts. Surging on Ripple's wave, Larsen has more money than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who previously ranked fifth on Forbes richest people in America list at $58.4 billion valuation. Larsen has also surpassed the individual personal wealth of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are on 8th and 10th spot on the same list, respectively.
What's crazy is that just on Monday, Forbes had estimated Larsen's wealth at around $37 billion and placed him at 15th spot on the Richest American list. Within just four days, he now occupies the #5 spot and adding $23 billion to his net worth.
Reuters
Ripple's bottomline is currently valued at $235 billion right now,?and the San Francisco-based start-up is using blockchain to develop a payments network with more than 100 financial institutions onboard, according to a statement. Ripple also claims that its settlement time for XRP coin is ludicrously fast at just 4 seconds -- Ethereum's settlement time is at 2 minutes, while Bitcoin's can be over an hour.
If you missed out on investing in a Bitcoin, maybe Ripple or XRP's the real deal. Best of luck!
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