Polkadot And Ripple Switch Places In Top Crypto Rankings

The crypto market experienced another turbulent day of trading, with Polkadot (DOT) being among the few crypto projects marking double-digit price gains. 

According to data from Cryptobrowser.io, Polkadot made a 26% daily price rally, which managed to raise the market capitalization of the projects enough to surpass Ripple (XRP). DOT began trading at an intraday low of around $11 just to reach an all-time high of $14.86 a few hours later. Since then, Polkadot retreated to a price point of $13.77 as of press time. 

Source: CryptoBrowser.io

Nevertheless, comparing Polkadot to Ripple based on their weekly performance, Ripple is down 12,9%, while Polkadot recorded a 44,5% price push. Meanwhile, stats from Polkadot’s official page suggest DOT flipping XRP with around $3 billion difference before the price correction. 

Looking further into the weekly charts, Polkadot’s performance stayed with mostly a sideways pattern, with a dip in the early hours of January 11. After the dip, Polkadot’s price action changed in jumping from $9 to its $14,86 high without any significant drops. 

Polkadot, dubbed as a direct rival to both Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, resembles a multi-chain protocol, consisting of multiple “parachains”. Those parachains are also found in other projects – Ethereum calls them “shards”. However, Polkadot relies on its own blockchain framework, dubbed “Substrate”. 

One of the main Polkadot benefits over other blockchains is that Substrate is completely interoperable, allowing other blockchains to operate as sidechains, making cross-blockchain transactions possible. Substrate has the ability to process thousands of transactions per second, which gave Polkadot’s blockchain the nickname “Ethereum killer” due to the bottlenecks in the present Ethereum blockchain. 

However, Polkadot’s price push may be due to the announcement of the Rococo parachain testnet launch in late December 2020. Polkadot also announced more and more projects are joining as partners in the parachain, with Polkadot unveiling that 19 inclusion proposals are waiting for acceptance in the new chain. 

“Earlier in 2020, we launched Rococo V0, which was based off of our prototype parachains code. Now, we’re introducing Rococo-V1, based on the latest version of parachain consensus — the same code that will run on Polkadot and Kusama. The parachains V1 codebase is our production-ready code for parachains consensus, which differs from V0 in the mechanisms by which parachains are included as well as having a more robust and extensible software architecture,” the team at Polkadot announced in a blog post.