Ripple price has started the week well. The XRP price is trading at $0.5617, which is 235% above the year-to-date low of $0.1660. It is also about 30% below its highest point last year. Other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are relatively mixed, with the three down by more than 1% in the Asian session.
The background: Ripple has been under intense pressure in the past few months after the SEC started investing the company. Its case argues that unlike other decentralized currencies like Bitcoin, XRP is actually a security. Ripple has defended itself, saying that XRP was an open-source currency like BTC. As a result, many prominent cryptocurrency exchanges decided to delist or pause offering the XRP.
What’s happening: The Ripple price is soaring today after many social media users came to its rescue. In chat rooms during the weekend, thousands of traders talked about how they were buying the currency, which they view as being undervalued. Others cited their purchases as a way of punishing the SEC, which they view as an unwanted bureaucracy. We saw this trend last week when Dogecoin price rallied, pushing it into the top-ten of the world’s biggest cryptocurrencies.
On the daily chart below, we see that the Ripple price has been relatively volatile in the past few months. After months of consolidating, the XRP price soared to a high of $0.7893 in December before collapsing to $0.1720 in January. It then rose back to yesterday’s high of $0.600 because of social media enthusiasm. As a result, the pair remains above the 25-day and 50-day exponential moving average while volume is rising.
Therefore, I suspect that hype will push the Ripple price to the important resistance at $0.6030. However, as I warned in my Dogecoin article, we are in uncertain times and there is a possibility of a major pullback as traders start fearing about a pump and dump scheme.
