ETH and BNB are trading flat right now — but XRP has risen by 10.5% in 24 hours.
Bitcoin has once again managed to break $40,000 — despite one U.S. politician warning that the growing crypto market increases “the risks to our financial stability and our economy.”
The world’s biggest cryptocurrency hit this all-important level for the first time since June on Monday, riding high on rumors that Amazon planned to accept BTC as a payment method. However, prices cooled when the retail giant issued a denial.
Other factors at play include a rather brutal short squeeze that has liquidated the positions of those who were making bearish bets on Bitcoin.
BTC has risen by 4% in the past 24 hours and by 26.4% over the past seven days — but smaller altcoins such as Ether and Binance Coin are flat on a daily timeframe.
Subscribe to the CoinMarketRecap podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
XRP Shines Bright
One cryptocurrency that has put in an outsized performance on Wednesday is XRP, which has surged by 10.5% over the past 24 hours — heading as high as $0.7518.
This appears to be linked to the news that Ripple is looking to make inroads into the remittance market between Japan and the Philippines, which is worth a cool $1.8 billion per year.
In a blog post, Ripple announced that SBI Remit, the largest money transfer provider in Japan, is teaming up with the Filipino mobile payments service Coins.ph — as well as the crypto exchange SBI VC Trade — to establish a new remittance corridor using Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity service.
The use cases behind this are compelling. Figures suggest that, at 10.5%, Japan has one of the highest remittance costs in the world — almost double the 5.92% that is typically seen in G8 countries.
SBI Remit’s Nobuo Ando said:
“The launch of ODL in Japan is just the start, and we look forward to continuing to push into the next frontier of financial innovation, beyond real-time payments in just the Philippines, but to other parts of the region as well.”
