Hey! We drafted this on Sunday morning, then went about our business, then…well there was even MORE growth in the Ripple price. See below for our take on what this means, and check out Coinmarketcap.com for the latest price news.

While you may have been otherwise occupied this weekend, the altcoin markets were hard at work driving the price of Ripple (XRP) to heights that they haven’t seen in quite some time. First, some tweets to summarize the weekend Ripple developments.

whoa buddy – $1.5B market cap on $XRP – let’s discuss pic.twitter.com/9nPYtU52GD

— Meltem Demirors (@Melt_Dem) April 2, 2017

Never thought I’d see @Ripple‘s $XRP moon so hard 🚀🌝 2nd most liquid #cryptocurrency over last 24 hrs. pic.twitter.com/9CiqmWaXxr

— Chris Burniske (@ARKblockchain) April 2, 2017

But wait, there’s more…

(Thanks to Smith and Crown for the chart.)

Now there are 3

Only three cryptocurrencies now own a market cap of $1B (USD) or higher: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple.

Why now – especially when Ripple not once but TWICE had a market cap of more than $1B?

(See below chart from CoinMarketCap.com.)

We’ll make a couple bets as to why that happened now, and what that means for your wallet.

Number 1: It’s becoming the back office that makes transactions possible. A good chunk of the Ripple community sees this as a missed opportunity for Ripple.

Number 2: The big banks are getting involved – and the news is somewhat buried. See this writeup from Cryptocoinsnews.com about MUFG (they’re huge) getting on board.

Next step? Who knows…

We’re pretty certain that what Ripple has earned over the past few days could be summed up in one word: legitimacy.

Since the beginning of time, money has needed to have perceived value in order to be legitimate. You could trade rocks for food back in the middle ages, but, at some point, the provider of food is going to want to see a rock that looks like it has some value. Shiny rock, or well-polished rock, or rock that sparkles like diamond or is made of something like silver or gold.

The fact that Ripple has (1) crossed into the 10-digit territory and (2) is being used by big banks adds a shiny, well-polished sparkle to its value proposition. And that means good things.