Altcoin Ripple has soared over 150% this week (up 50% today) to its highest level since May as optimism spread surrounding Ripple Labs Inc.’s plans for using a digital coin.

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The optimism spread, dragging the rest of the crypto-space higher on the week...

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And, as CoinTelegraph's Moilly Jane Zuckerman notes, Ripple (XRP) has now overtaken Ethereum (ETH) to be ranked number two by total market capitalization on CoinMarketCap.

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As of press time, Ripple has a listed market cap of around $23.39 billion, while Ethereum - now in third on CoinMarketCap - has around $23.2 billion in market cap.

Notably, the last two times that XRP has topped ETH, it has quickly collapsed.

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 Bitcoin (BTC) is still ranked number one, with a market cap of around $116 billion.

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At the beginning of this week, Ripple executives hinted that it may launch a service that will use the digital currency “in the next month or so.". Called xRapid, the service lets financial companies such as payment providers speed up money transfers into emerging markets using XRP, which Ripple says is an independent digital asset. A Ripple spokeswoman said Thursday that there isn’t an official commercial release timeline at this point.

Also this week, PNC, a top ten U.S. bank, announced that it would use RippleNet to process international payments for its customers.