So, today the trend finally broke it seemed: XRPsurged from under 0.40$ to a short-term high slightly below 0.80$ based on really good news and dragged the entire crypto market up.

Now the question is: will this be sustainable?

Let's have a look.

What's up with XRP?

So, the news was that xRapid, the XRP-based product of Ripple, is heading towards a launch and some real adoption within the next month. Apparently, PNC, one of the world's 10 largest banks, is planning to use Ripple's solutions for its cross-border and foreign exchange transactions. However, despite the first news PNC would also adopt XRP for that purpose, later it was clarified that this probably won't be the case.

In any case, these news have been welcomed by the market with an extraordinary rally at sky-high trading volumes:

• September 18th, 10am UTC: XRP is being traded around 0.27$
• September 20th, 10am UTC: XRP trades at between 0.32 and 0.33$ on major exchanges
• September 21st: XRP starts a rally via 0.40$ through 0.47$ up to 0.80$, before falling back to and stabilizing around 0.57 or 0.58$

At some point today, XRP had surpassed ETH as number 2 on Coinmarketcap for the first time since January, but ETH stroke back pretty much immediately.

Is XRP now the new draft horse of crypto?

This is hard to answer, but at this point rather unlikely. So far, that's only been news and announcements, but nothing has actually happened yet. Also, it's really hard to tell what impact any of the news could possibly have. Are customers going to use XRP or only xCurrent / xRapid without XRP (can xRapid be used without XRP?)? What will be the transaction volumes? How much XRP will be burned through transaction fees? Totally unknown.

The number of transactions and the fees have gone up today, but that's probably just because people transferred their XRP to or from exchanges to trade.

Why is this still really good news?

If this is any real, tangible news and Ripple Labs will deliver xRapid and start adoption, this would be really good for the entire crypto space. Ever since the end of the bubble last December / January, a lot of criticism has come up that crypto is only good for speculation, but real-world adoption is pretty much non-existent. This could be changed with some of the big old-school players starting to adopt xRapid and XRP, giving us a glimpse of hope after the long bear market this year. I suppose this is why so many people have started buying, e.g. with ETH being up 20% over the last 24h.

Let's watch xRapid and see whether Ripple Labs can actually deliver on their news.