XRP fell nearly 10% today, while BTC was down only around 6%. I need to take a closer look at that gap.
Let’s start with three numbers. XRP is now around $1.18, down about 9.8% over 24 hours, after briefly touching $1.34 the day before yesterday. It’s down about 20% over the past 30 days, compared with roughly 10% for BTC. Its market cap is around $75 billion, keeping it among the top-ranked cryptocurrencies.
Looking at what happened to it this week, quite a bit:
1. On November 4, the XRP Ledger rolled out the fixCleanup3_4_0 patch, closing a vulnerability that could allow “an account with only burn permissions to also mint tokens under certain conditions.” It affected assets issued on the ledger, such as stablecoins; XRP itself was unaffected, and there was no public confirmation that it had been exploited.
2. The validator vote for native lending protocol XLS-66 has reached 21/35. It needs 29 votes to start the two-week countdown, so it’s still 8 votes short.
3. Ripple minted about 110 million RLUSD in a single transaction on November 2.
These are all slow-moving factors. My habit is to just keep track of them, not treat them as buy signals. The lessons from past mistakes have taught me that when the broader market deleverages, the assets that rose the fastest are the first to get hit. XRP surged to 1.34 the day before yesterday, and today it was the first to give back those gains.
There’s one other detail that makes me cautious: according to CryptoQuant’s figures, Binance’s XRP reserves increased by about 280 million tokens over the two days from 11/3 to 11/5. Tokens moving onto an exchange don’t necessarily mean they’ll be sold, but at this price level, I wouldn’t read it as good news.
There are two things I’m watching next: first, whether the 1.18–1.20 range can hold, since it’s near last week’s low; second, whether the lending protocol vote can reach 29 votes. Tonight’s 21:30 nonfarm payrolls report is likely to have a more direct impact on it than any on-chain news.
For those of us holding XRP, did you buy more on this dip, ride it out, or get out already?
The above is only my personal opinion and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk.