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YouTube social networking website seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Ripple (XRP) has been on a tear lately, rising some 100% over the last seven days on the news Ripple Labs is launching a new product that could help banks speed up transactions using XRP.
Now ripple could be in for another price surge after it was revealed content creators on some of the internet’s biggest platforms will be able to accept payments, or tips, in XRP tokens directly through a company called Coil, which was founded this year by a former Ripple Labs executive.
XRP is down some 70% from its peak as most major cryptocurrencies readjust after last year’s huge bull run. The ripple price surged to more than $3 last year, up from just $0.006 it began the year at.
Ripple is now trading at a little over $0.55, giving it a market capitalization of $22.2 billion and making it the third most valuable cryptocurrency.
Ripple (XRP) has doubled in value over the last week as investors bet new use cases will bring a fresh wave of interest.CoinDesk
Video streaming site YouTube, along with the gaming-focused streaming service Twitch, and Wikipedia, are the three biggest sites involved in the Coil trial which will allow content creators on those sites to receive ripple tips through Coil’s browser extension app.
Coil charges users $5 per month for a subscription to its service and is currently invite-only, though it is planning to eventually open up registration.
Ripple Lab’s former chief technology officer Stefan Thomas launched Coil earlier this year, promising to help save the internet from ads.
“For decades, people have discussed the potential of micropayments to support content creators that would move us away from the broken ad-supported web,” Thomas wrote in a Medium post.
“Others have created subscription services that bundle content. But micropayments and subscriptions have always been built as closed systems, which fail to capture the huge variety of content on the web.”
Coil would appear to be doing something similar to the now-defunct Changetip, a tipping app that was popular across many of the internet’s social media sites before it was shuttered in late 2016 after burning through $3.5 million in funding.
Coil could also clash with web browser Brave, which offers similar services to its four million users via its BAT tokens — in addition to increased internet privacy and an ad-blocking.
Last week Sagar Sarbhai, head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, told CNBC that Ripple Labs is close to launching a new product that could help banks speed up transactions using XRP, sending the ripple price sharply higher and sparking a wave of interest in the financial industry-focused cryptocurrency.
Many are excited by ripple’s practical use case, which has seen it work with many of the world’s biggest banks and financial service companies to bring cryptocurrency’s speed and efficiency to the rather clunky legacy financial systems.
