Why is the Price of XRP Down Today?

The price of XRP is down by more than 4% over the last 24-hour period to now trade at $2.3, down from a high of around $2.4, with the drop seeing the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization drop to around $132 billion at the time of writing.

While the rice of XRP is down over the last 24-hour period, zooming out shows that the cryptocurrency is still up around 250% over the past month, as it was trading around $0.67 just a month ago, before its price started surging and new spot XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF) filings were made.

There appears to be no clear catalyst behind XRP’s drop over the last 24-hour period, other than a wider cryptocurrency market downturn that has seen the price of various major assets drop between 0.5% and 7%, presumably as traders lock in gains from the recent surge.

A potential motive behind XRP’s underperformance over the period could be fear and uncertainty in the market, associated with a recent transaction flagged by monitoring service Whale Alert, which revealed Ripple has moved 380 million XRP worth around $915 million to an unknown wallet.

As reported, large whales on the XRP Ledger have been heavily accumulating the network’s native cryptocurrency, with data showing that as the price of the XRP token rises, so do large whales’ holdings.

According to data from on-chain analytics firm Sentiment, as first pointed out by popular cryptocurrency analyst Ali Martinez, cryptocurrency whales with between 1 million and 10 million XRP tokens have accumulated more than 100 million tokens, worth over $240 million, when the token’s price saw a small dip. 

Indeed, the firm’s data shows that addresses in this cohort heavily accumulated the cryptocurrency over the last few weeks, to now hold an estimated 4-79 billion XRP tokens, while addresses holding between 10 million and 100 million XRP tokens have, since the beginning of the year, steadily been adding more tokens, going from around 5.2 billion XRP to now have 6.91 billion tokens.

Santiment’s data further shows that addresses with between 1 million and 10 million tokens seemingly accumulated as addresses holding 100,000 to 1 million XRP dumped amid the cryptocurrency’s price rise, with the holders of the latter cohort dropping by roughly 200 million XRP over the cryptocurrency’s price rise.

Featured image via Pixabay.