It’s no secret we firmly believe in Ripple’s potential, both as a startup (from a company and growth perspective) as well as its cryptocurrency perspective (value of its XRP token). We made our point in great detail in our Ripple forecast for 2019 as well as our Ripple fundamental analysis as part of our 5 cryptocurrency predictions. This week, once again, we got a confirmation of Ripple’s position to become the largest cryptocurrency in the world in the future, overtaking Bitcoin at some point in time. This is why.

It is stunning how the opinions on Ripple diverge among crypto investors and analysts. In this research report an analyst forecast Ripple’s price to fall to $0.01. How can anyone be serious about such a Ripple price forecast? It’s because of the way you frame the topic of future cryptocurrency value.

We are no crypto perma-bulls, certainly no Ripple perma-bulls. We are factual and as unbiased as possible investors that have learned the hard way over time. Yes, we can look at facts, further than just charts and article headlines. 

However, the way we frame future cryptocurrency value is based on lean startup principles. In the end every cryptocurrency is just a startup that has to discover how to create value. Looked at it from this perspective the signals of customer discovery are the ones to focus on. It’s a totally different perspective, one proven to confirm our crypto forecasts which are exclusive to members of the first crypto & blockchain investing research service in the world.

This is the perspective that sets InvestingHaven’s research team apart from all other analysts and blogs. It’s this perspective that we take in this article as well.

Ripple’s fundamentals: another series of confirmations

We do not attach value in most of the news headlines. As per Tsaklanos his 1/99 Investing Principles it is only 1% of news that matters to investors, the rest is noise and even dangerous for your portfolio and mental/emotional health. In other words, 99% of news will damage your wealth and health, also in crypto and blockchain.

First, this week we heard from an American Express executive what Ripple means to them. Note that American Express is corporation with a market cap of $91billion. What such a company tells about Ripple should be taken very, very seriously.

Speaking at the Wings of Change Europe conference in Madrid earlier this week, Carlos Carriedo, general manager of corporate payments at American Express explained that Ripple has the potential to improve the way payments are traditionally processed around the world.

This is the quote from the embedded video:

Blockchain is absolutely an option we’re looking at. Just to give you a sense, we have invested in a fintech lab based on blockchain technology, just to understand how to leverage this better.

We did a pilot, partnering with Santander locally, and with Ripple to just do cross-border transactions. Cross-border transactions continue to be complex and slow. And in a matter of seconds, through this test, our clients were able to transfer funds in a very transparent and seamless way, from one part of the world to the other one.

More importantly, the next sentence is telling: “More to come. There are still a lot of things that have to be addressed with blockchain as a technology but it looks very promising.” 

These are statements that have to be taken seriously. Let’s look at this differently: which other crypto startup or cryptocurrency is achieving similar disruptive things? The answer: there is maximum a handful of crypto startups in the world which get to the level of Ripple.

Next, there was this announcement that R3 is adding Ripple to its blockchain service. R3 is a blockchain company that has gained wide recognition as it leads a consortium of more than 200 firms in R&D in the financial system.

Richard Gendal Brown who is the CTO of R3 stated this week in an official comment:

The deployment of the Corda Settler and its support for XRP as the first settlement mechanism is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together.

While the Settler will be open to all forms of crypto and traditional assets, this demonstration with XRP is the next logical step in showing how widespread acceptance and use of digital assets to transfer value and make payments can be achieved.

The exact details of what the Corda Settler is does not really matter here. What matters is that Ripple is firmly evolving to the core of the financial system with an advance hardly seen before in the financial system: it speeds up cross border payments with a factor of 10,000x.

Ripple’s chart: the largest cryptocurrency during the next bull market

From an investing perspective we want to see fundamentals reflected on a chart.

Ripple’s daily chart shows relative strength. As Bitcoin fell through its $6k level, and, in the meantime, trades 40% lower, Ripple’s XRP token is still 20% below its August and September lows. 

More importantly, with every sell-off in the crypto market since October we see relative strength in XRP, but on every rally we see leverage in XRP’s price.

All this is the reason why we firmly believe that Ripple’s XRP price will overtake Bitcoin’s price during the next crypto bull market which will likely start in the second part of 2019.