From Adoption to FOMO: Reasons Behind Ripple's Leap

Background: What does Ripple bring to the table?Ripple is a California-based payment network and protocol company that was established in 2012.

Ripple's native token is XRP. However, the company draws a line between the two: Ripple presents itself as a technology company, while XRP is an "Independent digital asset" built on open-source blockchain technology called XRP Ledger.

As per its website, Ripple uses both XRP and XRP Ledger in its products, such as xRapid, and owns 60 billion XPR - however, it allegedly does not control either the token nor the technology.

Theory #1: xRapid's launchxRapid is a blockchain-backed tool designed by Ripple for easing cross-border fiat transfers between financial institutions.

Ripple hopes to use it to pioneer the mainstream financial system: After testing the platform to run payments between the United States and Mexico in May, it proved to save transaction costs by 40-70 percent.

Ripple is considering entering the Chinese market to apply its distributed ledger technology to cross-border payments, as Jeremy Light, vice president of European Union strategic accounts at Ripple, told CNBC on Aug. 15.To explain XRP's recent breakthrough, some Reddit users suggest that xRapid has been quietly launched, while Ripple is going to announce it at a later stage.

On Wednesday, Sept. 19, Ripple announced that PNC had joined RippleNet to process international payments for its customers.

"It's one of the first major U.S. banks to use blockchain tech to streamline payments into and out of the country," Ripple tweeted.

Senior vice president for product management of Ripple, Asheesh Birla, thinks that using xCurrent in banking is the first step toward the adoption of other Ripple products, such as xRapid.

To defend the company's native token, he pointed to the open-source protocol of the XRP ledger and its independence from the corporation itself, emphasizing that Ripple controls only seven percent of the validator nodes operating on the network.