As I'm sure everybody has noticed, Ripple has taken off recently. I'll bet most of us who have been holding stellar for a bit are a little bit jealous that Ripple has gotten so much attention. While Stellar has been getting a bunch of attention over the past few weeks, I can't help but think to myself "Wow, what if that was Stellar in #2 instead" Don't get me wrong, where we're at is absolutely incredible, but Ripple's recent growth is actually very good, for two main reasons.
1.) It's psychology. Many uneducated investors look at Stellar as a "Ripple 2.0" of some sorts. Thinking that Stellar is doing the same thing as Ripple, going after the same clients, and has the same vision. While this isn't exactly true, new investors will look at it with the mentality of "I just made a killing off of Ripple, I'm gonna move to Stellar since they're doing the same thing. It'll take off real quick, and the current supply is nearly half, so the price should be double!" As you can see, this has brought a bunch of new people into Stellar's community, just look at how much our Reddit community has grown! Once they start reading our Reddit posts, and learning about Stellar, they'll understand that we're actually quite different.
2.) Market Strength. Up until the past few weeks, the entire crypto market has always been dominated by Bitcoin. Bitcoin made up about 80% of the crypto market until 2017. Throughout this year it's been around 50% (+/- ~10%). In simpler terms; what bitcoin did, the market did. Anytime bitcoin would go up, everything else usually followed. When Bitcoin crashed, almost everything would crash. What this meant, was even if there was great news about Stellar it would still suffer if bitcoin was suffering too. Thanks to Ripple's rise (and a few other coins) Bitcoin is now about 38% of the market. Stellar will no longer have to suffer when Bitcoin goes through a correction. So hopefully we should now start to see growth based on Stellar's progress, not Bitcoin's runs.