Ripple price (XRP) soars as South Korean exchanges drive surge in trading volumes

The Ripple price has soared around 60% over the past 24 hours amid a surge in trading volumes. The rapid advance has allowed Ripple to briefly overtake Bitcoin Cash as the third-largest digital currency by market capitalisation.

According to data from industry tracker Coinmarketcap, Ripple (XRP)’s 24-hour trading volume is currently at $2.27 billion and is second only to Bitcoin’s $2.42 billion.

The surge in trading volume appears to be driven by increased trading activity on South Korean exchanges, which offer Korean won trading pairs. XRP/KRW trading on Bithumb currently accounts for nearly 47% of the global market’s activity, followed by Coinone and Korbit. Together these exchanges make up nearly 80 percent of the total XRP trading volume in the past day.

Ripple, the San Francisco-based distributed ledger company behind the cryptocurrency, issued a report last month, in which it pointed to the increased activity on South Korean exchanges as the main driver of an increase in fiat volumes during the second quarter of the year. While in the first quarter Bitcoin contributed to 85 percent of the total exchange-traded XRP volume, that number dropped to 63 percent in Q2, it added.

The latest developments signal that the dominance of XRP/BTC trading might soon be over. Ripple’s trading volumes are currently at record levels and the majority of that is driven by XRP/KRW. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue.

In today’s trading, the Ripple price stood at $0.284, as of 10:13 BST. The digital currency has gained 58.2 percent over the past 24 hours and its market capitalisation currently stands at $10.91 billion.