Investing.com - Ripple, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, hit a fresh record high on Thursday as its strong rally continued.
Ripple's XRP token hit a high of $3.26 on the Poloinex exchange earlier and was at $2.99 by 06:22 AM ET (11:22 AM GMT).
Ripple, or XRP, now has a market cap of $137.7 billion, in second place behind bitcoin, which has a market value of about $249 billion.
Ripple sells blockchain technology, powered by its own cryptocurrency XPR, to banks and payment providers and other financial institutions to speed up cross-border payments.
Blockchain — otherwise known as distributed ledger technology — allows vast amounts of data to be stored on a dispersed network of computers around the world, rather than on one centralized server.
It was originally used to record all bitcoin transactions but increasingly businesses are finding alternative uses for the technology, such as payments, trade finance and identity verification.
Prices have been boosted by news that Ripple has been conducting trials with a number of major financial institutions, including American Express and Santander.
Prices have also gained momentum with investors looking at alternative digital currencies beyond bitcoin. Bitcoin's dominance of the cryptocurrency market hit its lowest level ever on Tuesday.
Ripple rose in value by more than 32,000% over the course of 2017. It began the year trading at around $0.006 and ended at $1.98.
Ripple’s gains in 2017 outstripped the gains of Ethereum and bitcoin, which rose by roughly 9,000% and 1,400%, respectively.
Bitcoin was trading at $14,381.00 on the Bitfinex exchange, after touching a low of $14,064.00 earlier.
The digital currency had risen around twentyfold since the start of 2017, climbing from less than $1,000 to as high as $19,891 on 17 December on Bitfinex and to more than $20,000 on other exchanges.
However, from its all-time high reached in mid-December, the price dropped by almost half over the rest of the month before recovering to around $14,000.