it'd be interesting to know exactly where all the money flowing into Ripple is coming from and why.

If it's institutional money investing because they are going to be implementing the tech into their own operations, that's rational.

Though, one could also guess that it's just alot of newbies into the space who are just learning of it second to Bitcoin, not totally knowing what's what.

I think it'd be reasonable to expect that soon enough, some of the new attention in the space is going to start exploring what else is out there and see the relative undervaluation of numerous other projects with stronger value propositions, and being distributing accordingly.

Though, it could be that the institutional players do have their plans for utilizing Ripple and thus have more reason to stay invested in it.

Really hard to tell, given the sheer number of players and how much of this info doesn't leak to the internet...