Ripple is a decentralised remittance platform - You can transfer fiat currencies, digital currencies, and commodities.
It uses the blockchain data structure and has its own consensus protocol.

In the Ripple Whitepaper you will not find the term block and blockchain - They use the term ledger instead.

There are two kind of nodes in the system:

   Gateway nodes - registered financial institutions, exchanges, merchants, and so on - If you want to become a gateway node in the network you need permission to form a trust chain.

   Validators - responsible for validating transactions, anyone can become a validator - but other nodes can keep a list of validators that can actually be trusted.

   Regular nodes - Regular people.

The funny part is that there is no consensus to find whom to trust, the user takes the risk of trusting a gateway.

Banks are starting to test and adopt this feature, they are using ripple just as a method to transport their money from Bank A to Bank B with lower fees.

Ripple also has signed contracts with banks to buy the coin at very low prices like 0.005 Cents in any point in time until 2020 due to increased volatility in the market.

Which means that banks are buying directly from a centralised entity so they won’t lose any money in this process.

The price of ripple in the market is driven only by regular people and investors trying to gain some profits.

Even though if Ripple gets mass adoption for banks, the price will be manipulated only by regular investors.

Hmm it's a bit too far in the future for me to lay a prediction on that, but i can say that for this year things look pretty good.

Institutional Investors Will Bet Big on Cryptocurrencies in 2018

Crypto currency exchanges which are the best option for individual investors have seen immense growth.

Binance recently revealed that they added 250,000 new users in a single day. Kraken is adding 50,000 new accounts daily and they are logging an astonishing 10,000 new support tickets every day.

So regular people are investing, what about the big institutional investors?

They are making way towards 2018 - New money will be flooding the market.
Even the crypto-skeptic CEO of JP Morgan Jamie Dimon expressed regret about past statement that “Bitcoin is a fraud”.

Regular people are making profits of thousands of percent, the investors can’t stay away for long.

Hold

Bitcoin is the most secure cryptocurrency and it can be treated as a digital gold.

You will use bitcoin only to store your wealth and to send large amounts of it.

The bitcoin blockchain is slow for a reason, to resist Sybil attacks.

There will be other coins for day to day transactions.

My guess is that someday there will be a coin just for exchanging other coins at current price.

Imagine you are in a store and you own some BTC, the app on your phone syncronizes with the store owner’s app and shows you the exact price you have to pay at that particular moment in your current cryptocurrency for what you would like to buy.

We are years away from that, but the future looks good for blockchain adopters.

Etherium will be the most adopted platform in the world.

Think of it as an Android platform in which you can write de-centralized applications.

De-centralized applications or Dapps operate on the etherium blockchain with smart contracts.

Every piece of data will be on blockchain without anyone having the power to delete it or edit it.

Let’s say you order something on-line - When it leaves the warehouse, they introduce the data on blockchain - Now they know if something happens to the package, it can be traced back to the last generated smart contract.

Imagine this on every maintenance cycle of an airplane or any other machine.

There will be no central authority, point of failure or mutable data.

That’s why people trust it and embrace it - Increase in usability = Increase in value.