If any cryptocurrency beats all records on great news in 2019 it must be Ripple’s XRP (XRP), likely followed by TRON. Interestingly, though, it seems that the quality and meaningfulness of the news only improves, and that’s a characteristic not any other cryptocurrency has.

We review a number of recent news items that classify as ‘news that really matters’. The number of confirmations suggesting that our XRP forecast of 20 USD is underway, that XRP will become the largest crypto during the next bull run and in doing so will qualify as the number 1 blockchain investment of 2020 keeps on growing.

Let’s look at Ripple from several different angles just to ensure we take a broad view and avoid the perma-bull trap.

Note that in no way are we perma-bulls on XRP or any other cryptocurrency. We stay factual, and look at every cryptocurrency from a broad perspective. However, we look at crypto investing from the lens of adoption, which is the true differentiator against 90% of crypto content you may find out there.

As per our 100 investing tips for successful long term investors:

Falling in love with the investment is killing your profits. Love is an emotion, and emotions are your biggest enemy, and have the potential to destroy your account value. The one characteristic of all these top investing opportunities is that they have a short-lived period in which they really go ballistic. After that it is over for a couple of years at best (many, many years worst case). Never fall in love.

The under-estimated blockchain opportunity

The blockchain opportunity is amazing. Not many understand how big this will become, not many understand what it truly is.

When it comes to Ripple some tend to look at Ripple and the XRP cryptocurrency as a payment provider. While that’s not wrong per se, it is only a small part of the story. As per Ripple’s CEO they are a disruptor and bring innovation on and for the INTERNET OF VALUE.

Now THAT’s a totally different value proposition.

Although not specifically referring to Ripple in her speech Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, referred to the “inclusion revolution” as the major blockchain opportunity.

She said that blockchain will revolutionize how transactions around the world will happen, referring to examples like:

• the hundreds of millions of people that need to exchange money or any other ‘value’ with their relatives, in a fast and reliable and cheap way;
• the very high number of small businesses that need to transact with each other;
• the billions of people that are unbanked in the world (we all underestimate how many people do not have access to traditional banking services).

Speed and ultra low cost is one benefit. The other one is reach, as in reaching people or companies or organizations that otherwise were unable to reach each other because of the limitations of the current banking and financial system.

Guess what? Ripple’s platform offers solutions for all of these problems with XRP transferring value from any point to any other point in a reliable, fast and cheap way.

Ripple is growing fast

Ripple as a company keeps on expanding, fast, very fast. It is the only company that has a cryptocurrency that is growing that fast.

Examples include their new offices they are opening up in Asia, in several countries, but also their new London office. The European activities keep on expanding, and more importantly Ripple helps European companies with their global expansion.

Here is more about how exactly Ripple’s services combined with XRP can help with this in How European business are using blockchain to expand globally. Some relevant quotes:

• “By helping Euro Exim Bank to increase the velocity, volume, veracity and value of cross-border payments, Ripple has allowed the company to develop its key growth markets quickly and efficiently.”
• “Mercury FX aims to make money move faster around the world for clients at a lower cost. To overcome the high costs and long turnaround times of the existing SWIFT network, the company turned to Ripple’s innovative technology. The payments are moving a lot faster and cheaper than they would going through SWIFT, says Mercury FX.”
• “The benefits for customers are more than just speed. Feedback from people carrying out real-time transactions to India suggests they bring peace-of-mind, as customers are confident that the money will arrive. Ripple is giving TransferGo a real competitive edge in India, which is the largest global cross-border remittance market. The rest of the world will follow. “Our vision is to become a global real-time payments company,” states Snitka. “We see Ripple as a strategic partner moving forward.”

Mind that these companies talk about moving value around the globe, they are not talking payments. A big, big difference.

“XRP will reach mass adoption in Japan”

In Japan there is SBI Bank that is partnering with Ripple. It is a bank with a market cap of more than $5 billion, not really a small bank in Japan, on the contrary.

The chief of SBI Bank, Mr Yoshitaka Kitao, aims to leverage XRP in a way that will create mass adoption in Japan.

Mr. Yoshitaka Kitao, who is an influential in Japan’s banking and business world, sees no functional value in Bitcoin, but only in XRP. He has a very strong belief in the use cases and value that XRP can unlock. SBI will provide “investment instruments incorporating virtual currencies into institutional investors,” he said.

Moreover, next month Ripple and SBI Bank are planning to launch the exchange ‘VC Trade’ in Japan which will bring 20 million new users to the world of crypto!

Listen to the video update >>

XRP misunderstood by financial media is a great contrarian signal

Obviously, we could have expected some news on financial mainstream media about XRP’s listing on Coinbase.

Forbes ‘analyzed‘ the ‘reason’ why XRP’s rally was not sustainable after the announcement that it would list on Coinbase. These are two reasons by one of the analysts they interviewed:

“First, XRP has been plagued by negative press this year and as a result, the token has been lagging the broader market all year,” he stated. Second, while the first announcement did coincide with a modest rally, “those gains were quickly erased when the people who bought before the news sold into those buying after the news.”

Every time we see this type of statement we tend to ask out loud whether anyone was smart enough to check a chart. If not we’ll do it here, and indicate it is best practice to check charts when making statements about prices and relative strength.

This is the relative strength chart of XRP against BTC. The long term trend is crystal clear: XRP becomes stronger over time compared to BTC. Since last summer there is a consolidation visible on the relative chart, see yellow circle. That is correct, consolidation it is, not what Forbes writes.

Moreover, and probably the more important point, thinking of it like Forbes says it is much more of a security behavior. Equities do rise on good news because the securities marketplace is a discounting mechanism. It looks six months ahead in time when pricing a security in the present day.

Obviously, cryptocurrencies will move higher on liquidity, which comes after adoption.

Fortunately, in the same Forbes article, this other analyst got it right:

“Throughout this entire bear market news and public developments haven’t been able to spark any sort of uptrend,” said Garcon. “Nothing has moved the market. I believe the best news is news of adoption,” he emphasized.

And this brings us to our last and most essential point. The vast majority of people do NOT understand Ripple, especially not XRP. Their viewpoint is not the right one from an investment perspective.

This is what we wrote to our cryptocurrency investing members yesterday:

In our crypto investing assessment framework it is ADOPTION that matters for future growth and stimulus of XRP prices. All XRP opponents talk about ‘crypto internals’ like market cap or technical features. Just to be clear: their point might technically be accurate, but it is irrelevant from a crypto investing perspective! The arguments of opponents are weak at best, and destructive for a portfolio at worst.

Yesterday, we wrote a long and detailed alert to the members of our cryptocurrency investing research service about XRP. We explained in great detail why Ripple is an amazing company, and why XRP will outperform almost any other cryptocurrency in the future when it comes to price. We also explained our viewpoint on the JP Morgan coin which essentially we consider a non-event.

Moreover we added a Ripple and XRP FAQ section which has 5262 words answering all concerns that crypto investors have related to Ripple and XRP.