It is relevant to the future of all cryptocurrencies, not just Ripple.
while that is news...
didn't coinmarketcap jump because additional coins were released and therefore increased the "value" of each coin by tenfold?
Great question.
A lot of confusion exists on this point.
A basic market cap calculation looks like this: Price x Supply
Price is based on what people are willing to pay for the currency, and derived from exchange information. Releasing additional coins does not directly impact the price of each coin. It will impact the market cap, however, since market cap is calculated according to the price. Due to how coinmarketcap.com calculates market cap, there will be spikes in market cap as additional xrp are distributed. Increasing the distributed supply, however, does not increase the price.
A good visual example is the large xrp distribution that occurred toward the end of August:
Note that the market cap spike did not increase the price.
In general, I think market cap is a horrible metric for judging the overall value or potential of a currency. Fixating on that metric, in isolation, is a hallmark of the pump/dump crowd in my opinion.
CoinGecko and other sites are working to provide more meaningful data to evaluate currencies, by factoring in things such as community/developer activity, volume, and liquidity into a single ranking. All of those things scored together give a more meaningful picture.
Regarding Ripple, since it is a network and protocol supporting multiple currencies, I am most interested in the Total Network Value that can be found at the top of ripplecharts.com. It reflects the sum of all currencies, including xrp, that users are using within the Ripple network. As a majority of other currency protocols do not support multiple currencies, however, it is not a good metric for comparison against things like Bitcoin.