The Rise Of The Crypto Currency – Ripple Back To Record Highs

As the New Year reached its third day, crypto currencies continued their impressive rally with Ripple the star performer and reaching record highs of over $2.50 and climbing. All currencies showed a steep rise with several recovering their positions that date to the pre Black Friday crash. Litecoin showed an impressive rise of well over 20% from its low of below $200 to rise to above $250 before falling off slightly during the day. Ethereum roared ahead with figures of 15 to 20% to raech the $870 mark at one point and it was still rising slightly at press time. Bitcoin Cash also posted a strong recovery rising by well over 20% to reach levels of $2700 to 2800 showing that there is a lot of life in this currency after all in conjunction with Bitcoin. Dash was also strongly up, recording a rise of 10% putting it at levels of $1100-1200.

Bitcoin was also steadily up and rose to levels of around $15,800 after having touched lows of $14,000 during the day. It appears that the Segway fork is now having its effects and these are to be deemed as positive overall with the world's largest crypto currency now expected to roar ahead and top the $18,000 mark pretty soon. Ethereum Classic which was the currency that started off the rally also continued roaring ahead and was reaching levels of well over $30 on Tuesday having traded around $25 in the past few days.

All these increases have led to the total crypto currency market cap rising considerably and it is now only around $11 billion away from its all time high. This is quite a speedy recovery from the lows seen in late December when the market cap went down by no less than $200 billion. It is also interesting to note that the price rally has been almost totally driven by the spectacular rise in altcoin prices since the price of Bitcoin is currently hovering around the $14,500 mark although it has increased slightly in recent hours.

Cryptocurrency valuations climbed a combined $30 billion leading into the first regular business day of 2018, bringing the cryptocurrency market cap to $642 billion. This represented a single-day increase of five percent and placed the cryptocurrency market cap within striking distance of $653 billion, the all-time high it set in mid-December as the bitcoin price approached $20,000.

Other relatively new crypto currencies such as Cardano and Monero posted considerable increases while the new crypto currency Stellar also posted a huge 32% increase. The stellar price rally appears to be tied to its recent addition to Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx which currently ranks as the fifth-highest volume exchange. OKEx announced it would list stellar on December 28, and the price began to shoot up shortly after the XLM market opened the next day.

However, trading volume has been thin so far with OKEx has processed just $1.4 million worth of XLM/BTC volume during the past 24 hours, but it will likely increase as more investors return from holiday vacations and become aware of the new XLM market. This could be acrypto currency to watch in the not too distant future.