It appears that Ripple is in a strong potential reversal zone, it has already retraced pretty high, and it has multiple divergences and a fractal break up, it also appears that we may have completed a diametric pattern, and are breaking up out of a triangle. This gives us a good chance for a break up here and a strong bullish continuation. Ripple may continue the pattern of altcoins getting massive bull-runs this year and bitcoin continuing to stagger. If we can break through all the harmonic resistances shown that should give us some nice support at those levels and then we can continue up for awhile. As usual with altcoins, it's usually a good idea to take some profit or hedge along the way, especially when it starts to look bearish , but this does look like it could have an all-time-high run over the next year if my diametric count is correct. Also an interesting note is that the candles look extremely similar to how ETHBTC looked right after it bottomed out.
Fundamentally, Ripple has a much better chance of getting regulated and being brought to a major market, like NYSE or BATS, than bitcoin because it is more centralized. There is also a lot of banks around the world that are looking at ripple as a form of real-time gross settlement. To banks, a system like Ripple has a lot of advantages over bitcoin . Banks really aren't interested in "alternative money" like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies , they're interested in the underlying distributed ledger technology, and that is exactly what Ripple is. They WANT more control over the system, they don't want to give up control to miners who are securing the network based on the price of the currency, they like distributed ledgers because they can actually give banks more control over their back-end systems, bitcoin will probably never be used for this, and as such, Bitcoin and Ripple should be seen as completely different technologies. Some people like to say Ripple has no value because it is centralized, or because the fundamentals are so different from Bitcoin , but that is simply not the case. It is just valuable for different reasons and big Banks definitely see the value in Ripple, while they've been pretty cold towards Bitcoin . This sets the stage for Ripple to have a pretty massive long-term bull-run now that all the weak hands are out of the market and new money is flowing into cryptocurrency .