Why Did Ripple’s (XRP) Price Crash by 18% in 36 Hours?

TL:DR;

• XRP was the top performer from the larger-cap alts until yesterday afternoon, but its price has tumbled hard by double digits since then.
• Could that be related only to the market-wide retracement, or is there more to the story, such as another ‘sell-the-news’ event?

Recall the price developments around XRP that took place earlier this week. The asset stood at around $2.35 but exploded on Monday evening to almost $2.6 after the company behind it announced that its long-anticipated stablecoin would be launched on the next day – December 17.

The positive movements continued on the launch date as XRP skyrocketed to a multi-week peak of $2.73 (on Bitstamp and other exchanges).

However, Ripple’s cross-border token failed to maintain its momentum despite multiple highly bullish price predictions.

Just the opposite, it started to retrace and dropped to $2.5 earlier today before the market-wide correction after the Fed’s latest rate cut pushed it south violently to a 6-day low of $2.23.

Although this plunge could be attributed to the overall crypto market drop, XRP’s retracement is more painful than most, being down by 11% on a 24-hour scale and by 15% on a 36-hour one.

XRPUSD. Source: TradingView

As such, this could go under the ‘sell-the-news’ category, given the fact that XRP jumped ahead of the RLUSD launch, and its price has tumbled after the new token actually went live for trading.

Additionally, the situation around a potential XRP ETF in the States doesn’t seem too bright, at least according to experts on the matter. As reported earlier, Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas warned that Ripple might be behind other projects that could be greenlighted first, such as Litecoin and Hedera.

The ETF expert predicted that such a wait could be related to Ripple’s ongoing legal tussle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission even though there will be a seismic shift in the agency’s leadership in the next few months.