Investing.com – Ripple surged past a historic milestone of $1 on Thursday even as Bitcoin, the largest digital currency by market capitalization, continued its decline.
Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency with gains of more than 1,000% this year alone, was facing its fifth consecutive day of losses on Thursday. It is down around 20% since hitting an all-time high on Sunday (it trades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).
That record high coincided with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)’s launch of its own Bitcoin Futures on Sunday following rival CBOE’s own version just a week earlier.
The creation of these derivatives from regulated exchanges has fueled speculation that the move will attract interest from institutional investors who have been kept on the sidelines due to the fact that cryptocurrencies are generally unregulated, which prevents their participation.
Some observers have attributed this week’s losses to “buy the rumor, sell the news”, while others suggested that Bitcoin was simply long overdue for a correction.
Bitcoin’s performance this week has likely fueled investor appetite for alternatives. Ripple is one of these options and rallied around 40% on Thursday. It is currently the fourth largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $40.23 billion, following behind Bitcoin ($283.22 billion) Ethereum ($83.57 billion) and Bitcoin offshoot Bitcoin Cash ($62.43 billion).
Ripple, which was designed for banks and global money transfers, offers a more affordable price-tag than many rivals in the cryptocurrency world.
As of 11:09AM ET (16:09GMT), Ripple jumped 33.30% to $0.9530, off an intraday high of $1.07442.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrency markets, Bitcoin traded down 5.36% to $15,546, furthering its decline from last Sunday, while Ethereum lost 2.62% to $774.00.
Bitcoin Cash led decliners as it slumped 18.07% to $3.025.20. Of note, Bitcoin’s offshoot -created in a “fork” from the world’s largest digital currency on August 1 in a move that was designed to be able to process transactions more quickly at a lower cost- was coming off a 5-day rally from $1,774.10.