What does the future hold for Ripple ?

For those not aware, Ripple’s token (XRP) was worth $0.0060 at the start of 2017. Now, its price hovers around $1.00.
The cryptocurrency shot up in price by more than 1,000% in the month of December.
I believe XPR is a “centralized” cryptocurrency. Ripple Labs, the company behind it, does not try to target common people with its marketing efforts. Instead, Ripple is meant to be a technology stack for banks and large enterprises that enables them to transfer assets (any assets, not just cryptocurrencies) in a timely manner. Until recently, it was mostly ignored by the crypto community as a platform that is not in line with the original Satoshi Nakamoto vision (getting rid of banks, not siding with those responsible for the economic crash) and overall decentralization philosophy.

One of the Ripple co-founders, Jed McCaleb left Ripple Labs in 2013 and went on to develop Stellar -- a hybrid blockchain. Initially, Stellar was a fork of Ripple, but upon testing it, Stellar Development Foundation prompted concerns about the integrity of the platform’s consensus protocol. In a nutshell, it expressed doubts as to Ripple’s ability to survive attacks as, according to them, no one had tested at scale what would happen to the network if it ever faced malicious activities. Stellar completely re-architected its consensus protocol and now has a completely different byzantine fault-tolerant blockchain of its own.

I must say I don’t necessarily condemn Ripple. It’s a company with its own functioning software that, from a bank’s perspective, can be quite beneficial. I do, however, take issue with speculative bubbles (i.e., people driving prices artificially for the wrong reasons).