The world just got itself a new billionaire. After some deliberation, Ripple (available on Binance) co-founder Chris Larsen has unofficially been declared the richest person in the world.

George Kikvadze, the founder of BitFury, tweeted out that with Larsen’s 37% stake in the Ripple (available on Binance) company, which is estimated to have a value of $320 billion, Larsen is now richer than both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Source: CoinMarketCap

But how stable is his newfound position among the world’s billionaires? That all comes down to the stability of Ripple (available on Binance).

Ripple (available on Binance) has surpassed all expectations in the last two weeks, outranking Ethereum (available on Coinbase) as the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, breaking a market cap of $132.8 billion, and exceeding the $3.00 price mark – what this all comes down to is a 49,000% price increase over the past 12 months for the aLTCoin nobody had heard of less than a year ago.

When looking at the progress that Ripple (available on Binance) has made since it was first created back in 2012 (see chart above), you’ll see that it remained stable, if obscure, for years before it began to take off in May 2017. From then until its most recent success, the aLTCoin also saw a fairly steady settlement, hovering between $0.10 and $0.20. That was all before attention really started being turned on Ripple (available on Binance), and before the aLTCoin started making all the headlines. The skyrocketing hike (and hype) that is being turned on Ripple (available on Binance), is not so different from the early days of Bitcoin (available on Coinbase). Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) has seen its fair share of ups and downs, making it a highly volatile cryptocurrency. Now that Ripple (available on Binance) has seen a massive climb, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the aLTCoin take just as massive of a drop, making it just as volatile a token as Bitcoin (available on Coinbase).

What this means, at its simplest, is that the status of Ripple (available on Binance), and in turn Larsen’s billionaire title, is going to fluctuate. He might be the richest person in the world right now but what about a month from now? Or a year from now? It’s a volatile market; even if it doesn’t collapse, somETHing else could jump in its place (much like Ripple (available on Binance) did to Ethereum (available on Coinbase)).

Featured Image: twitter