It is arguably the week where Ripple restored much of the interest that had died off within crypto over the course of 2018.
On the back of an announcement from Ripple Labs on Wednesday of this week, which referred to the impending release of its xRapid platform – a transnational XRP-based payments solution – XRP’s price has reached $0.565 at the time of writing, almost precisely double of what it was seven days ago.
On the other hand, Solume – an online social signals metrics aggregator for cryptocurrencies – has established that social media activity surrounding Ripple has risen fifteen-fold over that same period. At its peak, Ripple’s Solume value hit 20,500 on September 21 – compared to an equivalent value of 1295 on September 14.
The Solume value for a cryptocurrency on any given day represents an aggregation of activity on both Reddit and Twitter and excludes Facebook from its calculations.
Crypto Interest Perseveres
According to the Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study, there are an estimated 50 million crypto-enthusiasts world-wide, representing less than 1% of the world’s population. And it is the social media activity generated amongst this community that is seen by some analysts as the most reliable indicator for tracking a cryptocurrency’s potential for future price increases.
According to Reddit Metrics, just under 40k users have subscribed to the /r/CryptoCurrency subreddit over the last thirty days, representing a 5+% increase in the number of subscribers overall – with CryptoCurrency also featuring in the top 100 subreddits for subscriber growth (from a universe of 1.2 million subreddits).
So whilst crypto prices have largely been tanking over the last nine months, there is little to indicate at this stage that the same can be said for general interest in crypto itself.
