Ripple (XRP) Might Have Overplayed Its Hand Against Bitcoin (BTC)

Ripple (XRP)’s bullish spree seems to have come to an end after XRP/BTC ran into historical resistance against Bitcoin (BTC). A lot of investors and analysts believe that Ripple (XRP) might have overplayed its hand against Bitcoin (BTC). If it had moved in sync with the rest of the market, it would still have a lot of room to move against Bitcoin (BTC) and the price could be expected to appreciate during a recovering market. We expressed our concerns regarding this development in some of our previous analyses. Ripple (XRP)’s rallies created short-term euphoria in the market and a lot of new investors flocked in to buy in large quantities. However, retail investors were not the only one to buy a lot of XRP.

In fact, some Korean whales saw an opportunity to load up during the bear market and dump it on unsuspecting investors as the market recovers. For all we know, they could have been artificially keeping Ripple (XRP)’s price up while the rest of the market tumbled in order to convince investors to trade their coins for XRP. Now that the market is full of bag holders with large amounts of XRP, these whales are looking for opportunities to dump under the mask of the price having topped short term. As always, most XRP investors will keep holding on to their coins thinking the price may recover long-term and the whales knowing their psyche will take advantage of them, as always.

Chart for XRP/USD (1D)

It is unfortunate that a lot of people in the crypto community do not think positively of Ripple (XRP). In fact, Coinbase did not list XRP despite repeated requests from community members. The interest was obvious and they could see it, but they simply wouldn’t list XRP. They ended up listing other coins like Ethereum (ETH) and 0X (ZRX) later on but not Ripple (XRP). Recently, Binance CEO took a hit at Ripple (XRP). Other prominent industry leaders also do not like Ripple (XRP). The main reason behind that is that they believe that Ripple (XRP)’s purpose of existence in the crypto market is to put other projects out of business. They are right to think that way because Ripple (XRP) team members including its CEO have repeatedly criticized Bitcoin (BTC) for being old, slow and expensive.

There are plenty of ‘centralized’ coins in the market. I do not think this is the reason most prominent industry leaders do not like Ripple (XRP). I think it has more to do with what it stands for and the people it wants to empower. While cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) want to empower owners and users directly by being in control of their own finances, Ripple (XRP) wants to empower the banks. This is the primary reason most in the crypto community do not treat Ripple (XRP) as other projects. There is Stellar (XLM) which empowers direct users with peer to peer transactions just like Bitcoin (BTC). Most people in the crypto community do not seem to have a problem with Stellar (XLM) but they do with Ripple (XRP). This is why very few institutional investors hold a significant amount of XRP. Most like Grayscale have only a small portion of their portfolios dedicated to XRP.