The cryptocurrency XRP supplanted BNB as the fourth largest in market cap, as Ripple, the company most closely linked to XRP, announced that it would be expanding in Brazil. As of Wednesday morning, XRP’s market cap was at about $93 billion, whereas BNB’s market cap was closer to $92 billion.
Ripple, which owns about 40% of the XRP supply, announced in a statement on Tuesday that in Brazil it plans on providing a suite of financial services, including cross-border payments, digital asset custody, prime brokerage, and treasury management. The company also plans to apply for a license with the country’s central bank.
“Latin America has always been a priority market for Ripple — not just because of the scale of the opportunity, but because Brazil has built one of the most advanced and forward-thinking financial ecosystems in the world,” said Monica Long, president at Ripple, in the statement. “We’ve spent more than a decade building the trust, licensing, and technology required to operate in regulated markets.”
The Brazil expansion comes shortly after the company bought back $750 million of its shares to put its valuation at about $50 billion. That buyback program from last week proved that Ripple could grow despite a turbulent period for the crypto sector at large.
The company, run by CEO Brad Garlinghouse, helps financial institutions send money internationally via the XRP ledger. Ripple and XRP have a long history: when the cryptocurrency was created in 2012, the company was given about 80% of its total supply.
While XRP is up to fourth among the largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum are still the top two. The former is down about 3% in the last day to its current price of roughly $71,000, and the latter is down about 6% during that time to its current price of roughly $2,180, according to Binance.