Stellar and XRP continue to rise. XRP rose by 17% in the past 24 hours to $1.6, its highest price since Monday, and Stellar rose by 18% to $0.7, its highest price ever.
The two coins are somewhat related. Both are the work of Jed McCaleb. McCaleb was one of the architects of the Ripple protocol, which uses XRP as its native currency.
In 2013, McCaleb left Ripple to focus on Stellar (XLM). Like Ripple, it’s fast, cheap and designed as a payments network.
XRP is the bigger fish. It has a market cap of $55 billion, more than double Stellar’s market cap of $18 billion.
However, Stellar has performed significantly better in the past week. In the previous seven days, it has increased by 31.9%; XRP has increased by just 4%.
The success of both is partly attributable to the market-moving tweets of Elon Musk, who trashed BTC as environmentally unfriendly. In a single tweet this week, Musk depressed the price of BTC from the mid-$50,000s to $49,000.
Energy usage trend over past few months is insane https://t.co/E6o9s87trw pic.twitter.com/bmv9wotwKe
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2021
Both Stellar and XRP use far less energy than BTC; they rely on a small number of validators to verify transactions, while BTC relies on a vast network of power-hungry computers.
Other, less environmentally damaging coins have also flourished in light of Musk’s about-turn on BTC. Hedera Hashgraph has risen a further 16.37% to $0.36, Solana another 15% to $47, Cardano by 10% to $2.39 and Algorand by 8% to $1.53.
Most of the above rely on proof-of-stake, a consensus algorithm that allows those who hold the greatest proportion of the coin supply to verify transactions.
