YetAnother(TM) Ripple (XRP) price prediction

Ethical disclosure: I am not affiliated to Ripple and/or Coinbase/GDAX whatsoever. I do own publicly traded XRP. This post isn’t written with the intention that you go out and buy some, but if you do, to you I say “to the moon!”

Disclaimer: 120% personal opinion based on my own brand of logic after reading the entire Internet. (Please keep arms and feet within the ride at all times.)

When I wrote ‘Why Ripple (XRP) isn’t ‘Ripple’ and why it maybe matters’ I wanted to add a flippant price prediction because you can’t go far reading about a cryptocurrency without finding one.

I very quickly realised I was writing out all of my rationale and I didn’t sound like a complete moron so I decided to spin it out into a second post… so here we go.

(These are not in order, and I nearly blew a gasket putting them into such so you get to enjoy a stream of consciousness instead. DOYR.)

You might find other exciting posts in my Medium profile.

My X(RP) Factors

Ripple’s evangelistic progress

Ripple continue to do some great work like signing up American Express and adding more and more exchanges. Check out Ripple Insights (https://ripple.com/insights/)

Ripple don’t sell direct

Ripple do not sell XRP to the general public directly. To my knowledge, this isn’t going to change.

Public sentiment and what not

Public sentiment and overall interest seems healthy.

While some may view commercial gain from cryptocurrencies as impure and against the grain of original cryptocurrency purposes (open; free; equal; decentralised etc) Ripple is a commercial organisation and as such their PR/marketing engine will do or die trying.

Ripple is commercial

Like their marketing team, they will do or die trying: a core objective is to make money. Thats always handy when looking for value.

Ripple has a well-funded team

A 30s search into each of their named leadership team and a scroll through their list of investors does wonders to assure me they won’t disappear in the dead of night and they probably have a good idea of what they are doing and what their plans should be — https://ripple.com/company/

Non-tech friends ‘know’

Friends who I have spoken to (who operate in totally different sectors and still use Yahoo email addresses) already know a pleasantly large amount about XRP (subject to the stone however).

How many did I talk to? 5.
(A complete cross-section of the entire human population, clearly)

GDAX/Coinbase

In my view, XRP meets Coinbase/GDAX’s digital asset framework requirements for being listed — this at least doesn’t rule XRP out.

When (oh you optimist Joel) XRP is listed, this could open the shuttle bay doors and ignite the jet fuel.

Coinbase/GDAX have sizeable trade volumes (and users, lots of new users). In my humble view Coinbase is the best ‘consumer’ facing cryptocurrency exchange — Coinbase’s iOS app topped Apple’s US iOS App Store.

They could choose not to because XRP doesn’t serve a public purpose per-se (I could argue, Bitcoin doesn’t anymore either) but I think their commercial sense will prevail when combined with the allure of all of the potential transaction fees.

XRP is ‘green’

XRP’s consensus voting model is wonderfully energy efficient compared to Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW) models.

This is particularly interesting as Bitcoin isn’t helping worldwide energy consumption problems. At all.

XRP isn’t subject to inflation

But it is subject to theoretical dilution because Ripple (the organisation) hold so many XRP.

Institutions will have large chunks of XRP as well, but I would be surprised if they are simply allowed to sell them.

Less than 40% of XRP is in public circulation.

XRP has controlled deflation

Some XRP is destroyed (forever!) every transaction, however the amount destroyed is quite small (and can be reduced) and each XRP can be divided as well (you don’t need at least 1 XRP to do something).

XRP is fast

Payments settled within 4 seconds. Reportedly can scale to handle VISA’s transactional requirements with ease.

XRP is stable

Born in 2012, I believe it has now processed over 35 million transactions without issue.

Again, it has a commercial team behind it, who will whip their cryptographic developers if they need to.

XRP has two values and prices, and values aren’t prices

When institutions sign up to RippleNet and want to use xRapid, they will maybe buy XRP from Ripple (rather than simply be given some). If they do buy XRP… it is highly unlikely they will buy at prevailing public market rate — https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/.

XRP’s purpose and uses (xRapid etc) — value — doesn’t actually matter to XRP’s public price until the interface to RippleNet is public to all or institutions need/buy publicly traded XRP to fuel their RippleNet activities.

Both appear to me as… unlikely.

Further, because of this dual-split of the same commodity, the value of XRP to institutions on RippleNet is different to that of the public and while the separations described hold, the values and prices effectively stay mutually exclusive.

If you like, inside RippleNet XRP could be $0.01 while outside it’s $10 and it really wouldn’t matter at all to either side because we can’t access RippleNet’s XRP and they don’t need ours.

Hold on, did you just say XRP’s purpose/value doesn’t matter to its public price?

Exactly — it’s all virtual commodity stuff entirely disjointed from original purpose and ecosystem (RippleNet; xRapid etc).

Yes, I’m serious.

Its the same for Bitcoin.

What part of XRP’s value does matter for its public price then?

Most of the X(RP) Factors above still hold, particularly the stable; inflation/deflation; fast; team; commercial; Coinbase/GDAX etc.

Other than that, it’s a mind game.

Um, back to the price prediction then… I guess

At the time of drafting, we’re at $1.10 USD per XRP.

Assuming there aren’t any major negative events such as Ripple give up the ghost; accidentally join and exchange and click ‘sell’ on their XRP stash; or RippleNet/xRapid discovering their cryptography is broken…

…and Coinbase/GDAX list XRP at some point.

I boldly predict where lots of others have predicted before:
A high of $8 USD per XRP in 2018.

A finger-in-the-air says a $309,913,158,776 market cap based on the circulating supply (38,739,144,847 * 8 = $309,913,158,776) would be absurd but stranger things have happened. (I’ll post eventually on why I think Bitcoin won’t die but will give way.)

I concentrate on circulating supply, as the total supply would give us a really fun market cap ($800 billion or so) but in reality doesn’t matter at all because we won’t see those coins and institutions will probably never need the coins the public has (see the ‘Hold on…’ above).