XRP Price Action: A Bearish Time for the Digital Asset

XRP, the 6th largest digital asset in the market, is currently experiencing bearish momentums. From a presentation, it is indicative that sellers are now dominating the market. XRP’s value has been down by 10.9% within the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, the digital asset is trading at $0.701.

Negative Downturn for Buyers

The beginning of February 2022 saw a positive outlook for XRP buyers in the market. The digital asset began the month trading at $0.62 and rose to highs of $0.90 by February 9, 2022. From there, the digital asset showed bearish signs as sellers took over the market. The downward trend contributes to a price plunge in the XRP/USD pair. At press time, XRP/USD is registering a 13% drop within the last 24 hours. The pair’s price is changing hands at $0.69, slightly apart from the $1 psychological mark. In order to move the prices up, the market will require bulls to push through the current highs of $0.90. That way, XRP could retest a positive value and engage more buyers into the trade.

XRP Whale Alert

A tweet from a blockchain tracker firm reveals that there was a huge XRP transaction on February 22, 2022. The transaction saw a trader move more than 22M XRPs from Bitstamp to another digital wallet. Going by the current prices, the amount is equivalent to $15.8M. Furthermore, the wallet receiving the huge amount of XRPs is allegedly holding close to 111M XRPs. A whale transaction scenario usually indicates the beginning of greater volatility since investors are acquiring bigger portions of an asset. A major sell-off then begins to unfold as most users quickly join to sell their assets at a lower price. Whales end up winning in the end since they will start to acquire more assets at a cheaper price. Hence, the whale alert shows how sellers are still active in the market as they attempt to drive XRP’s value in a downward direction.

Ripple’s Legal Battle

The SEC lawsuit against Ripple Labs is another contributor to XRP’s price momentum. SEC moved to court in 2020 to sue Ripple for selling their security (XRP) without going through the financial watchdog. At the time, the SEC said that the securities sold were worth $1.3B. SEC also claims that the XRP executives gained profit from selling the security to investors. However, Ripple has been fighting back, arguing that SEC’s rule is unfair since the company is providing similar services to other platforms. More importantly, the company never received an alert from the watchdog saying that it was carrying out unlawful activity. Ripple further argues that the platform’s funding came from a Venture capital source and not an ICO fundraiser. Since then, the legal battle has become a huge determinant of XRP’s trend in the market. The lawsuit is still ongoing as both sides are assembling more evidence to defend themselves and their allegations.