The whole market capitalization of the $XRP token has increased by more than $1 billion in just 24 hours, at a time when investor interest in the cryptocurrency field is high and prices are rising rapidly.
According to TradingView statistics, $XRP’s market capitalization increased from more than $20 billion to more than $21.4 billion at the time of writing, following a 7% increase over the previous week and a nearly 20% increase over the previous 30 days.
$XRP is currently selling around $0.42 per token, up from roughly $0.33 at the start of the year. The platform’s technical indicators indicate that the cryptocurrency has more opportunity to expand, with moving averages indicating a “strong buy” and oscillators indicating a “sell.”
As CryptoGlobe reported earlier this month, the cryptocurrency community predicted that the price of $XRP will grow to close to $0.40 by the end of January, implying that the cryptocurrency’s price would have to rise more than 14% from its current levels.
While the projection is currently being exceeded, the community appears to be fairly gloomy, with the average price estimate for the end of February indicating a $0.41 price tag on the coin.
According to CryptoGlobe, whale addresses on the $XRP Ledger with between 100,000 and 10 million tokens (between $34,000 and $3.4 million) grew their holdings fast at the end of last year, increasing from 16.7% to 18.3% of the cryptocurrency’s supply.
XRP whales began adding to their holdings around the end of September and early October, when the cryptocurrency’s price began to rise as both the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple Labs sought to settle their legal dispute.
In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple and two of its executives, saying that they sold unregistered securities when they distributed $1.3 billion in XRP coins. Ripple claims that XRP is not a security.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated earlier this month that the fintech business is unlikely to settle with the SEC in the litigation, but that a decision will come “sometime in the future single-digit number of months.”
Jeremy Hogan, a proponent of $XRP and a US legal counsel, has stated that the lawsuit’s settlement could result in an XRP supply shock, which would presumably lead to a price increase as demand remained constant but supply fell.
