XRP gives back recent gains after Ripple’s announcement of $500 million investment

Ripple, the company behind XRP and its largest holder, announced Wednesday a $500 million investment at a $40 billion valuation from a number of crypto investment shops, including Pantera Capital and Galaxy Digital.

On the same day, the firm also announced a pilot initiative with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to explore using Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for fiat credit card transactions, marking “one of the first collaborations where a regulated U.S. bank settles traditional card transactions using a regulated stablecoin on a public blockchain.”

The news sent the token’s price up to the $2.38 level, bucking a larger trend that has seen most cryptocurrency prices drop. Unfortunately, the market’s optimism faded and the price of XRP has dropped over 5% from that recent high as of 11:30 a.m. ET.

Meanwhile, RLUSD has seen a 30% increase in its supply over the last month, bringing its market capitalization to over $1 billion. Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth predicts the supply of all stablecoins in the crypto space will exceed 1 trillion within the next two years, and sees Ripple’s stablecoin crossing the 1 billion supply mark as a great development.

“A wider variety of players will only encourage competition, and competition is what healthy markets need to deliver the best products to end users,” Unsworth told Sherwood News. 

Delphi Digital analyst Simon Shockey said, “The stablecoin pilot and fundraising round show they’re trying to rebrand from a legacy token company into a full-fledged fintech and payments business.”

Shockey added, “It’s hard not to see this as a precursor to going public at some point.”

The developments follow Bitwise and Grayscale revealing fees for their upcoming spot XRP ETFs, which hope to join an increasingly crowded altcoin ETF race.