The IOTA price continued to surge on Tuesday, enabling the native currency of the “next generation blockchain” project to surpass Ripple’s XRP token to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency.
IOTA Price Surges Past $3.50; Market Cap Eyes $10 Billion
The IOTA price has been on an absolute tear in recent weeks. In the past month, the IOTA price has climbed more than 900 percent, bringing it to a present value of $3.52. Most of that movement has taken place within the last week, and as CCN has reported, it appears linked to the announcement that IOTA is partnering with a litany of corporate giants to conduct a two-month demo of an Internet of Things (IoT)-based Data Marketplace.
Today’s 24 percent increase is likely a continuation of that bullish trend, as many casual investors learn about IOTA for the first time and FOMO begins to set in. At present, more than 80 percent of all IOTA volume is concentrated on Bitfinex, while Binance accounts for another 18 percent. MIOTA/USD is currently Bitfinex’s largest trading pair — larger even than BTC/USD. Altogether, traders have exchanged more than $1.2 billion of IOTA today, shattering the cryptocurrency’s previous all-time high.
Even more significantly, The rally has caused IOTA’s market cap to surge to $9.8 billion, enabling it to surge past ripple to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency. IOTA remains about $16 billion behind third-ranked bitcoin cash.
This is quite remarkable, given the groundwork that Ripple — the fintech startup that created XRP — has laid for XRP adoption in recent months. Just last month, for instance, Ripple partnered with credit card processing giant American Express to create a transatlantic payment channel between the U.S. and the U.K.
However, market cap is not the only metric by which IOTA is growing. According to data from Reddit Metrics, /r/IOTA was the sixth-fastest growing subreddit on Monday, placing it ahead of all cryptocurrency subreddits — even /r/bitcoin.