Other top Ripple holders would have also zoomed up that list as the value of their tokens soared more than 100 percent during the last week — and more than 30,000 percent in the last year. The boom has turned Ripple into the second largest virtual currency, within striking distance of the original behemoth, bitcoin.
The explosion in Ripple's value over the past month is the starkest illustration yet of how the mania around bitcoin has spilled over into a broader universe of virtual currencies. These coins — with names like Cardano, Stellar and Iota — are generally new twists on the bitcoin technology, which uses a decentralized network of volunteer computers to keep a record, known as a blockchain, of all transactions.