NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather forecasts

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
    • The Great NZ Road Trip
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
    • Cooking the Books
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • What the Actual
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Business

$180 billion Bitcoin rival's meteoric rise

NZ Herald
5 Jan, 2018 02:53 AM4 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Economy Hub: Is Bitcoin a real threat?

Ripple's founders are the latest crypto billionaires.

The price of ripple has increased by 1240 per cent in the last 30 days, from around 25 US cents to $US3.38, surging past bitcoin cash and ethereum to become the second largest cryptocurrency.

This time last year, ripple was sitting at just under 0.7 of a US cent. That's an increase in value of 51,542 per cent in 12 months.

Ripple's market capitalisation — the price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation — is now $US130 billion ($181b), roughly half that of bitcoin, with ethereum on $US96b and bitcoin cash on $US41b

Two weeks ago, ripple's market cap was just US$36b.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Mike Novogratz, the billionaire investor who last month revealed he was "pressing the pause button" on plans for a cryptocurrency hedge fund amid uncertain market conditions, has warned 2018 will be a "wild ride".

"Ripple Labs worth $US225 billion," he tweeted on Thursday. "Tenth largest company by market cap in the world. Makes [co-founder] Chris Larsen worth $US55 billion tying Mark Zuckerberg as fifth richest man in the world."

He added in a follow-up tweet, "At one point in the 1989 Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Japan was said to be worth more than the entire state of California, things that don't make sense don't last ... be careful out there."

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Larsen owns 5.19 billion XRP — the native currency of the ripple network — and a 17 per cent stake in the company he co-founded in 2012, according CNBC, putting his net worth at an estimated $US59.9 billion, ahead of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and just behind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

So what exactly is ripple, what makes it different from bitcoin, and what's behind the surge in interest? Ripple is similar to bitcoin in that both are decentralised ledger systems designed to facilitate transactions across the internet.

But while bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, ripple is a "decentralised transaction network that also contains a digital currency", as former employee Nathan Ihara explained on Quora in 2013.

"The bitcoin network tracks the movement of bitcoins. The ripple network can track information of any kind," he wrote. "As a result, ripple can track account balances of any existing currency."

Discover more

Business

Five cryptocurrencies to watch in 2018

03 Jan 09:37 PM
Business

Peter Thiel's bitcoin jackpot revealed

03 Jan 11:58 PM
Business

Is this the end of banks as we know them?

04 Jan 08:04 PM
Opinion

Should bitcoin owners pay tax?

04 Jan 11:58 PM

That, along with its capacity to rapidly settle cross-border transactions, has made it attractive to traditional banks and financial institutions, with more than 100 adopting the technology so far, including Westpac and UBS.

"Bitcoin and ripple use a different method to reach network consensus," Mr Ihara adds. "Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (mining). Ripple uses an iterative consensus process. As a result, ripple is faster than bitcoin. It only takes a few seconds to finalise transactions. It's also more energy efficient."

As IG analysts wrote in a recent note, ripple effectively positions itself as a "complement" to bitcoin, rather than its rival. "The ripple network is meant to allow the transfer of any form of currency, regardless of whether it is the traditional sort, such as dollars or euros, or the new types such as bitcoin," IG wrote.

Unlike bitcoins, which are "mined" by computers on the network at a set rate to a fixed 21 million out to the year 2140, ripple is "pre-mined", with 100 billion units in existence, 20 billion of which were retained by the founders.

"The interest in XRP appears to tie in with its proprietary blockchain that's focused on financial service companies," Motley Fool analyst Sean Williams wrote recently. "In particular, ripple's blockchain could allow for cross-border payments and transactions that occur instantly, rather than waiting days as under the current system."

In a 2015 report, cryptocurrency researcher Tim Swanson argued banks would embrace "permissioned" ledgers like ripple — which use legal entities to validate transactions on the network — as opposed to bitcoin's "unpermissioned" ledger which relies on anonymous miners.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"No bank's going to want to put a billion dollars of value [on a ledger] if it can be destroyed by anonymous validators," he told American Banker.

"The idea with the distributed ledger system is to say, 'How can we take the useful parts of bitcoin — or at least the ledger idea — and integrate it with businesses that have legal reputations?'"

But that cosiness with the traditional financial industry also creates suspicion among cryptocurrency diehards — after all, bitcoin's original purpose was to cut out banks altogether.

Save

    Share this article

Latest from Business

Premium
Media Insider

Noise ban, off-limit interviews: TVNZ's rules as RNZ moves in; Ad agencies take aim at global merger

09 May 10:58 AM
Premium
Tourism

'Nothing was going to stop me': Pioneer who built ski resort from scratch sells up

09 May 07:00 AM
Premium
Shares

Market close: NZ sharemarket rises as gentailers make gains

09 May 06:03 AM

“Not an invisible footprint”: Why technology supply chains need optimising

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Business

Premium
Noise ban, off-limit interviews: TVNZ's rules as RNZ moves in; Ad agencies take aim at global merger

Noise ban, off-limit interviews: TVNZ's rules as RNZ moves in; Ad agencies take aim at global merger

09 May 10:58 AM

Untimely deaths of 3 respected NZ journalists; NZME set to take on Trade Me for car sales.

Premium
'Nothing was going to stop me': Pioneer who built ski resort from scratch sells up

'Nothing was going to stop me': Pioneer who built ski resort from scratch sells up

09 May 07:00 AM
Premium
Market close: NZ sharemarket rises as gentailers make gains

Market close: NZ sharemarket rises as gentailers make gains

09 May 06:03 AM
Premium
'Very happy': Jim Grenon to join NZME board with Steven Joyce in peace deal that ends bitter battle

'Very happy': Jim Grenon to join NZME board with Steven Joyce in peace deal that ends bitter battle

09 May 05:42 AM
Deposit scheme reduces risk, boosts trust – General Finance
sponsored

Deposit scheme reduces risk, boosts trust – General Finance

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • What the Actual
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven CarGuide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP