Bitcoin & Co in sideways trend – this top coin now stands out

While the overall crypto market continues to search for direction and is almost unchanged on a 24-hour basis on Friday morning, XRP stands out positively with an increase of more than six percent. The reason for the price jump, which had already started the previous day, is good news from the USA.

There, the crypto asset manager Grayscale has once again launched a fund for the cryptocurrency. The Grayscale XRP Trust is initially a closed-end fund that allows eligible individual and accredited professional investors to invest directly in XRP. The XRP Trust functions like Grayscale’s other single-asset investment trusts and is invested exclusively in the token underlying the XRP Ledger, the company said.

“We believe the Grayscale XRP Trust gives investors exposure to a protocol with an important real-world use case,” said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Head of Product & Research at Grayscale. “By facilitating cross-border payments that take just seconds, XRP has the potential to transform existing financial infrastructure.”

Grayscale already had an XRP fund on offer until 2021, but it was temporarily withdrawn from the market due to the legal dispute between Ripple Labs, the company behind XRP, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Since Ripple Labs is now considered the winner of the years-long process, the regulatory headwinds have subsided and the way is clear for a new edition of the product.

In the rather mixed overall crypto market, XRP reacted to the news on Thursday with a price jump of almost ten percent. Today, Friday, the token still stands out as the top winner among the 50 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, with an increase of more than six percent.

Speculation on spot ETF

There is also hope in the market that the Grayscale XRP Trust could one day be converted into a spot ETF – as was the case with the Grayscale funds on Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, the US approval of XRP spot ETFs would first have to be approved by the SEC, which seems difficult to imagine, at least under the current leadership of the supervisory authority, given the unfortunate history.

In addition, XRP still has a lot of catching up to do after the burdens caused by regulatory uncertainty. The strong price gains at the beginning of the year, which brought Bitcoin to a new record high in mid-March, have almost completely passed the token by. Despite the recent recovery, XRP is still down a good eight percent since the beginning of the year and even around 85 percent below the record high of $3.84 in early 2018.