The cryptocurrency market started the day bearish, with few coins seeing any growth but at press time, all but three coins on the entire market are in the green.

Ripple (available on Binance) (XRP)

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/Ripple (available on Binance)/#charts

Ripple (available on Binance) is among the top coins to make a rebound today. Currently, the coin is selling at $1.43 a coin, up 17.38% for the day.

What has changed with Ripple (available on Binance)’s plans in the last three weeks? Nothing.

On January 11th, news broke that money transfer giant MoneyGram would be testing a new pilot with XRP. This new service would be called xRapid and is ultimately designed to provide liquidity to financial institutions.

In their official press release, MoneyGram said:

“XRP remains the most efficient digital asset for payments with transaction fees at just fractions of a penny, compared to Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) fees of about $30 per transaction. Similarly, the average transaction time for XRP is 2-3 seconds with other top digital assets ranging from 15 minutes to an hour.”

This announcement did not do much for the price of Ripple (available on Binance), as one would expect. Many new announcements and partnerships within the cryptocurrency community often drive up the price of a cryptocurrency, like clockwork.

However, the value of XRP will ultimately be determined by its utility. Currently, Ripple (available on Binance) has more than 100 financial institutions in its network but just one bank, so far. The cryptocurrency is a long hold based off of what the project anticipates to do, solve the problem of cross-border international payments targeting financial institutions.

Stellar (XLM)

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/#charts

Stellar (XLM) is among another coin that is steady on the rise today. Currently, the price of XLM is selling for $0.50 a coin, up 8.06% on the day.

It’s founder Jed McCaleb left Ripple (available on Binance) to form Stellar back in 2014. At first, it was set up on Ripple (available on Binance)’s protocol but it now holds its own Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). Both projects are designed to conduct cross-border payments for two or more parties, in a quick and cheap manner. The difference is their target audience. As described previously, Ripple (available on Binance) is aiming more for the larger financial institutions. Whereas Stellar aims for the more individual use cases. The platform is still based on cheap and fast cross-border payments but the parties aren’t large institutions.

Stellar could be used for individuals in developing countries that would like to send money to their families across the globe. It also could benefit small businesses that want to transact on the global scale but can’t afford the high fees with current banks.

Again, just like Ripple (available on Binance), XLM’s ultimate value will come from its usability. If Stellar can make some major ground in 2018 with its software and developing it so that the average individual could easily use it, that would be huge.

Stellar’s target audience is much larger than Ripple (available on Binance)’s if you think of all the individuals that use Venmo. It could easily become a money transfer platform, similar to Venmo, using Stellar Lumens. Stellar could easily compete with Ripple (available on Binance), in the long run as it currently is sitting at the #7 spot on the entire cryptocurrency market.

Time will tell but the future looks bright for both of these projects in 2018.

Featured Image: Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)ist.com