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XRP price jumped Friday as interest in cryptocurrencies spiked after Tesla bought $ 1.5 billion worth of bitcoin from Elon Musk and BNY Mellon and Mastercard took steps to use the digital tokens.
XRP, the cryptocurrency of the Ripple network, rose a whopping 15% before declining slightly. According to Bitstamp, it was up 11% to $ 0.5987 from 9 a.m. ET.
Bitcoin price was 1.4% higher at $ 48,129 on the Bitstamp exchange, just off a record high of more than $ 48,300 reached Thursday.
Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla revealed on Monday that it had purchased $ 1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and planned to accept it as payment.
Due to the announcement, bitcoin soared to an all-time high of over USD 48,000. The coin has hovered below $ 40,000 for most of the past two weeks.
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On Thursday, bitcoin jumped to a new high of more than $ 48,300 after BNY Mellon and Mastercard both warmed to cryptocurrencies.
Mastercard has announced that it will allow merchants to accept certain cryptocurrencies on its network starting later this year. And Bank of New York Mellon said it will issue, hold and transfer bitcoin for customers in the future.
The announcements appear to have boosted other crypto assets such as Ripple’s XRP and Ethereum’s ether.
Ether, the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum network, was about even at $ 1,793 on Bitstamp on Friday morning. But it wasn’t far from a record high of over $ 1,800 reached earlier this week.
However, ‘Meme’ cryptocurrency dogecoin was down around 7% to $ 0.068.
“It seems that [XRP network] Ripple, like many others, is on the bitcoin wave, ” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at currency firm Oanda.
“Although it has performed significantly better so far than today. It has a lot of lost ground to catch up, so maybe that explains why it’s targeted.
“There doesn’t seem to be much else behind the moves, which should always be a concern, but that doesn’t mean that significantly more gains cannot be made, as we’ve seen so many times.”
The cryptocurrency of the Ripple network is very volatile. XRP rose and crashed in early February when a buy-and-hold plan organized by Reddit appeared to be falling apart after the price hit $ 0.74.
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