The cryptocurrency market has had a positive start to the week with gains being seen across all the major coins.
This has lifted the total value of the cryptocurrency market to a massive US$470 billion according to Coin Market Cap.
The highlight during trade on Monday has been the Ripple (XRP) price. At the time of writing the popular altcoin has seen its price rise over 9.5% during the last 24 hours to 98.6 U.S. cents.
Why is Ripple on fire?
While there has been no single piece of news that appears to have sparked this move higher, there has been a series of positive developments for the cryptocurrency that could have had a positive impact on sentiment.
The first is that last month global money transfer company Western Union confirmed that it is evaluating blockchain technology and is testing transactions with Ripple.
According to Bloomberg, Ripple told the news outlet that: "We've been testing different products with Western Union for a while. We're excited about our work towards a pilot implementation of xRapid, which uses XRP in payment flows."
On top of this, late last week CoinDesk reported that South Korea's Woori Bank has successfully completed a cross-border remittance test using Ripple's distributed ledger technology.
According to the release, the technology is expected to bring new efficiencies to banks' cross-border transactions by cutting middlemen banks out of the equation. There is speculation that this may just be the start of upwards of 60 Asian banks that may look at its use.
In light of this, I don't think it is a huge surprise to see Ripple outperforming peers Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Are there more gains ahead?
Considering Ripple has fallen almost 74% since peaking at US$3.80 at the start of January, there's certainly the potential for it to move higher if sentiment remains positive.
However, I wouldn't expect it to reach those levels again in a hurry and believe it will trade in a range of 90 U.S. cents to US$1.20 for the foreseeable future.
