All of the turmoil taking place in the cryptocurrency world right now is throwing a lot of people for a loop. All prices seem off, but that is only to be expected at this point in time. The XRP price has taken some big hits in the past 24 hours, even though very little has changed in reality. More specifically, the XRP price is still hovering near the US$2.50 mark, as it has been doing across Western exchanges for the past week or so.
XRP Price is Still in a Good Place
Although the numbers on CoinMarketCap.com may tell a different story, very few currencies have lost any value over the past 24 hours. In fact, most of them haven’t budged at all, even though their global averages are a lot lower than they were before. Now that CoinMarketCap no longer includes South Korean prices, things are finally returning to normal. Across Western exchanges, the XRP price has been close to US$2.50 for quite some time now. CoinMarketCap now also shows the global average XRP price as US$2.49, which is all that has changed in the past few hours.
Indeed, the XRP price hasn’t changed much in the past day. Granted, CoinMarketCap’s global average has dropped by 25.43% due to its decision to no longer track Korean prices. No one can take advantage of arbitrage opportunities using Korean exchanges, and thus it made virtually no sense to count their inflated prices in the global average. The individual exchanges’ prices are still visible on CoinMarketCap, though.
As a result, a lot of people are panicking due to the sudden “drop” in the XRP price. It is always important to put things in their proper perspective. XRP hasn’t lost much value against Bitcoin, as it is still trading at 0.00016472 BTC as we speak. This hasn’t changed in any spectacular fashion either, even though CoinMarketCap says it’s a drop of 18% since yesterday. Its XRP/BTC price was partially based on data from South Korea’s exchanges, and thus it doesn’t signify an actual decline either.
The important point is that XRP still is seeing over US$2.36 billion worth of 24-hour trading volume. That in itself is a pretty interesting number, although it is a fair bit lower compared to late last week. Do keep in mind the XRP trading volume on CoinMarketCap still takes South Korea’s volume into account, as that has not been excluded just yet. Nor should it be, as the trading volume is always worth keeping track of.
Speaking of which, Bithumb is the main trading market for XRP right now. It is well ahead of Binance’s BTC/XRP market and Coinone’s XRP/KRW pair. The largest actual fiat currency market still being tracked is Bitfinex’s XRP/USD pair, which brought in US$145.7 million worth of volume in the past 24 hours. South Korea is still trading XRP at US$3.80 right now, although that number has now officially become irrelevant to the rest of the world. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this trend moving forward, though.
All things considered, there is a lot of panic in the market right now. Most people have no idea what is going on, and they would rather sell their assets than try to figure things out first. As a result, we will see a fair amount of volatility, which in turn will likely impact the XRP price. That will mainly depend on how the Bitcoin price evolves in the coming hours. So far, things aren’t looking all that great in this regard, and it may only be a matter of time until the XRP price drops below US$2.15 for a few hours.
