XRP, which saw its fourth ETF filing Monday, also now has the third-largest market cap among all cryptocurrencies, after it shot past Tether’s USDT and Solana’s SOL.
Wall Street players are gearing up to introduce spot XRP exchange-traded funds, with ETF provider WisdomTree filing for a spot XRP ETF with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday
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Posted December 2, 2024 at 2:03 pm EST.
XRP has been the most popular token by trading volume in the last 24 hours on several centralized exchanges, such as Binance and Coinbase
XRP’s virality on centralized exchanges comes as the token climbed on Monday to a nearly seven-year high of $2.77, a 40% jump in the last 24 hours and a 433% increase over the past 30 days. The token native to the Ripple ledger currently has a market cap of about $158 billion, surpassing both Tether’s USDT and Solana’s SOL, making XRP the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
On Binance, the dominant non-U.S. centralized exchange, XRP’s 24-hour volume of $7 billion makes up 13.3% of total trading activity. For the U.S.’s biggest exchange, Coinbase, XRP has a 24-hour volume of $3 billion, comprising almost 30% of the total volume.
XRP tops trading volume on OKX, Kraken, and KuCoin as well, market data from CoinGecko shows. XRP trading on Upbit, a prominent centralized exchange in South Korea, makes up 38.6% of the entire venue’s 24-hour trading volume of $19.8 billion.
Wall Street titans are also preparing to launch spot XRP exchange-traded funds as ETF provider WisdomTree submitted a Monday filing for a spot XRP ETF with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, joining Bitwise, Canary Capital, and 21shares.
Small Retail FOMO
“The 6-year (nearly 7-year) high comes as wallets with 1M-10M XRP have accumulated 679.1M tokens (currently worth $1.66B) in just 3 weeks,” the team behind market intelligence platform Santiment wrote on X early Monday. At current prices, one million XRP tokens are worth almost $2.8 million.
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Maksim Tkachuk, who works on product at Santiment, further told Unchained over Telegram that the team is observing high levels of FOMO, short for “fear of missing out,” from small retail holders, defined as addresses with 100 to 10,000 XRP tokens.
“Overall when those retail darlings take the spotlight, the whole market becomes dangerous as the main drivers of the price at this point are greed and FOMO,” Tkachuk wrote. “Per [Santiment’s] internal agreement – the top is near… at least a very sizeable correction is what we agree on like 20-25 percent in majors.”
Stablecoin, RWA and DeFi Plans
Meanwhile, Ripple is gearing up to roll out a new USD stablecoin on its blockchain, as the New York Department of Financial Services is expected to approve the product, according to Fox Business last week.
Sally Zhu, who is part of the venture capital arm of crypto market-making firm Amber Group, messaged Unchained on Telegram saying, “I think XRP’s recent price surge is about the buzz around tokenizing [real-world assets]…” They’re teaming up with players like Archax to bring things like equities and global debts onto the XRP Ledger.”
Archax, a digital asset exchange, broker, and custodian, announced on Nov. 25 that it has provided access to a money market fund in a tokenized form on the XRP Ledger. “With such a huge opportunity to reshape how financial instruments are traded and managed, XRP is riding the wave of optimism now.”
Decentralized finance (DeFi), a subsector of the crypto space that enables users to conduct financial activities without intermediaries, has strong roots in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Some crypto users are now exploring DeFi on the XRP Ledger. For example, Robert Leshner, the CEO of asset management firm Superstate, said he was in the “trenches,” testing the infrastructure of automated market markets and inspecting the memecoins on the network, per an X post on Sunday.
Despite the recent upward price movement of XRP, people in the crypto space have long criticized the XRP Ledger for its lack of decentralization. Justin Bon, founder and chief investment officer of Cyber Capital, specifically pointed to the consensus mechanism for the XRP Ledger. “XRP’s consensus is based on UNLs (Unique Node Lists), literal centralized lists of trusted nodes released by single parties, including the foundation,” Bons wrote on X.
