ET's legendary stock & crypto trader was bullish at 20¢, writing on Sep 29, Ripple currently handles 1,500 transactions per second, 24/7, with the ability to scale up even further. Ripple has been channeling in the $0.17 to $0.20 range for the last several weeks. Based on current conditions, Ripple could easily be worth $1 within the next 52 weeks and $5 over the next several years. Some pundits are calling for $20-plus per Ripple, eventually. Ripple can easily be purchased by using other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and in some cases with regular currency, on a variety of exchanges. The easiest way I have found to buy Ripple with U.S. dollars is via www.kraken.com exchange.
https://www.kraken.com/en-us/help/faq What currencies can I trade bitcoins with? You can trade between bitcoins and euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars and Japanese yen.
A little education about Ripple. There is the company who holds like 50% of the existing coins, then: "They are in escrow, and Ripple (the Company) only has access to 1 Billion each month. At the end of the month, the unused portion goes back into escrow for 55 months. They're using them as incentives for adoption. Their core business is selling software (xRapid) to banks, and they likely are giving banks piles of XRP for free when they purchase their software. Case for XRP price increase: Cryptos are then used over xRapid by banks to transfer money to one another in 3 seconds, rather 4 days under the current SWIFT system. Once banks start to use RippleNet, they note that it's optimized (cheapest and fastest) when they use XRP. More volume boosts XRP's price." If you are thinking of buying their stock: "It's a privately held company, but if you are an "accredited investor" as per the SEC's rules, there are a few brokerages that sell it."
A few interesting tidbits about Ripple: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3321160-ripple-another-20-percent-blows-past-ether-sights-set-bitcoin .
Ripple is at $3.7 it was 22 cents a few months ago. What interesting is that supply is plenty although it is actually deflationary. The point here is that a product doesn't need to be rare to increase in value a lot...
Ripple CEO now 5th richest man in the world, ahead of Zuckerberg. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-04/anatomy-crypto-nightmare-ripple-ceo-now-richer-zuckerberg
Boy that guy is a conspiracy nuts. I love conspiracies but one could keep it factual at least. "To lay this out you have to believe a few things are true:" None of the 5 points listed are true. Kind of offtopic I just thought I would mention it...
Now the Ripple is the world's third-largest cryptocurrency in the Coinmarketcap. It's price lie b/w $2.50 to $2.70.