In brief
- Polkadot's price has increased by about 60% in the past week.
- XRP's price has dropped by more than 9% in the past week.
- Polkadot today overtook XRP in market cap size, $13.2 billion to $12.8 billion.
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Polkadot's price surge continues. The protocol's native DOT token is now trading for $14.66, after experiencing a nearly 60% rise over the last week.
Just two days ago, its market capitalization pushed past $10 billion for the first time. Now, according to data from CoinMarketCap, it's gone past $13 billion to overtake XRP.
With a market cap of $13.2 billion, Polkadot is currently the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, after Bitcoin ($696 billion), Ethereum ($136 billion), and Tether ($24 billion). XRP is currently at $12.8 billion.
Polkadot was created by Parity Technologies, led by Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner, which transitioned at the end of 2019 from working on Ethereum projects (including maintaining the Parity Ethereum client) to focusing exclusively on Polkadot.
Polkadot is an interoperability protocol for connecting multiple blockchains. Its native DOT tokens are used both for voting on governance issues and for creating "parachains."
While development is actively taking place on the Polkadot platform, trading activity is slowing for XRP.
In December 2020, the US Securities and Exchange Commission brought a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple Labs, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen. According to the SEC, XRP is a security; the defendants, all three of whom had access to considerable amounts of XRP because it was created by Ripple founders, have sold large amounts of XRP over the years.
Since the SEC's announcement, Ripple and XRP have faced a steady drumbeat of bad news. Just this week, Grayscale Investments dissolved its XRP Trust, and Kraken announced it would halt trading of the asset on January 29, joining a long list of prominent exchanges to do so. The price of XRP has dropped over 9% in the last seven days. It's now trading for under $0.30.