So I think I found the reason, of course ive never looked in depth into these charts before so I do not know if this data was integrated recently or not.
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#marketsSeems that the largest points of data are coming from ripple labs themselves as far as marketcap via ripple charts. Ive tried to poke around their website to see where the data was coming from and it was difficult, (the details next to the market cap provided button seems to be broken, and navigating around the site will sometimes display charts as internal server errors).
Ripple Charts is built and maintained by Ripple Labs, based on data from the Ripple Network.
Interestingly enough, these charts seem to exclude a quarter of the supposed marketcap with BTC38. If the data is coming directly from the ripple network, why does it not show an entire quarter of data? I would expect that these charts built by ripple labs would want to include all data.
All in all this smells really fishy, much like how ripple "passed" Litecoin marketcap. For those unaware, they really didn't pass Litecoin at all. The only thing they did was release a bunch of coins onto the network and changed the supply available. And since marketcap is calculated by price X supply, it shot up in one day (straight vertical line). Additional irony of this is that I dont think these tokens are in circulation, I think they are held by one whale. Therefore in essence nothing really changed except for the market manipulation that ripple did.
With that all said, this doesnt pass the smell test. Pretty sure this is more market manipulation to get "buy in".
Exactly.
No, this is unsubstantiated FUD that has been corrected multiple times. Ripple Charts tracks network exchange activity. It is open source, and you are able to run it and verify the data yourself. BTC38 is off-network, and therefore not tracked by Ripple Charts.
Here is an explanation of why the XRP market cap spikes. Your concern is with how coinmarketcap.com calculates market cap.
Before coinmarketcap.com modified their calculation, the complaint had been that all ~100,000,000,000 coins were used in the calculation. Now, solely those that have been distributed are used in the calculation, which in turn leads to spikes when distribution occurs.
Here is news that may be a factor in the continued steady climb of XRP.
I do not, however, recommend anyone invest in XRP without researching and attempting to thoroughly understand the system, or any other cryptocurrency for that matter.
