Ripple’s XRP Braced For A Bombshell After Coinbase Reveals ‘Airdrop’ Support

Ripple’s XRP, the third biggest cryptocurrency by value after bitcoin and ethereum, has soared over the last month.

XRP tokens, most of which are controlled by the company Ripple, have more than doubled in value in the last few weeks—pushed on by the bitcoin price rocketing toward its all-time highs and a hotly-anticipated giveaway of a new cryptocurrency, known as an airdrop.

Now, major U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has announced it will support the airdrop, scheduled for December 12—with those holding XRP at the time in-line to receive spark tokens from Coinbase at a later date.

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“The amount of spark you’ll receive depends on how much XRP you had in your account at the snapshot time,” Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges boasting some 35 million users, wrote in a blog post over the weekend.

“We plan to distribute the airdrop after the Flare network launch,” Coinbase added via Twitter. The Flare network is designed to bring ethereum-like functionality to the XRP Ledger with spark tokens the network’s native cryptocurrency.

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The free distribution of some 45 billion spark tokens is supported by Ripple’s investment arm RippleX.

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Other major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Cayman Islands-based Binance, South Korea’s Bithumb and Luxembourg-based Bitstamp, have said they’ll also support the airdrop.

Excitement around the giveaway has been growing in recent weeks, with cryptocurrency market watchers pointing to it as one explanation for XRP’s massive November rally.

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“The impending airdrop is supercharging the XRP bull market and whipping mindshare of one of the largest crypto communities into a frenzy,” Jehan Chu, a managing partner at Hong Kong-based blockchain investment firm Kenetic Capital, told Coindesk last month.

“With the imminent launch of Flare, a smart contract utility fork of XRP, the pair will attempt to challenge ethereum’s dominance in decentralized finance and decentralized applications.”

The ethereum price has soared by 300% over the last 12 months amid a flurry of interest in decentralized finance (DeFi)—using crypto technology to recreate traditional financial instruments such as loans and insurance with many DeFi projects built on top of the ethereum network.