Hi! Eric here.

XRP just broke its 2018 record by surging to $3.66 after quietly becoming the third biggest cryptocurrency in the world earlier in the week.

So why did XRP just explode?

That’s a bit trickier to say. 

Ripple, the company whose founders developed the cryptocurrency and that still plays an instrumental role in its utility, hasn’t broken any big news this week — apart from founder Chris Larsen cashing out $26 million worth of XRP.

Its long-running legal dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission remains unresolved, and the agency has disappointed those who bet that it would approve a spot XRP exchange-traded fund by summer. 

Sure, there has been earlier momentum with institutional investors pouring into the asset and the occasional partnership announcement from Ripple. Otherwise, it has been crickets.

Not that there’s been an absence of broader bullish market signals. 

After all, XRP’s record price caps an eye-watering rally within the broader crypto industry which saw the market surpass the $4 trillion value mark for the first time ever on Friday.

The week kicked off with Bitcoin breaking another all-time high at $123,000, with market watchers telling us that altcoins like Ethereum and Solana will soon follow. 

On Thursday, US lawmakers also voted through three landmark crypto bills. 

Of them, the Genius Act is due to hit President Donald Trump’s desk on Friday, despite some wobbles earlier in the week and against the protests of the Democratic leadership.

Zooming out, it’s not just crypto that’s enjoying tailwinds. 

Risk-on assets, such as Nvidia and Microsoft, are on a tear, propelling the tech-heavy S&P 500 index to record highs. 

The stock market gains have been fuelled by investor optimism that coincided slightly better than expected inflation figures, and Trump putting pressure on Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, to leave office due to his reluctance to cut interest rates. Trump denied having plans to remove him on Thursday.

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Post of the Week

Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, posted that he’d lost out on millions of dollars by selling XRP early. The internet was not sympathetic.

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