Ripple price is lower on the day as the XRPUSD asset stalled along with major cryptocurrencies over a sudden, unscheduled and unannounced maintenance by Binance exchange.
The driver of Ripple price action on the day was not the news of former Ripple exec Kahina Van Dyke joining Standard Chartered. Rather, it was the unannounced maintenance being undertaken by the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, which caught out many traders with open positions on XRP and other assets.
According to a tweet by Changpeng Zao (affectionately known as CZ in crypto circles), the Binance exchange’s halt in all trading activity was not as a result of a hack, but rather unscheduled maintenance to fix a data transmission issue being experienced by one of its partners.
“Unscheduled system maintenance. Trading paused. Working on it. Funds are #SAFU. No need to panic. One of the market data pushers had issues, matching engine was fine, no data loss or corruption (other than market data). Working on it. Should be fixed soon…” the tweet read.
The exchange also put out a statement which said that all deposits, withdrawals, trading activity and crypto transfers had been suspended.
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Ripple price currently stands at 0.29474 after the pair was able to bounce firmly from the support level at 0.28408. 0.30925 remains the immediate upside target, but attainment this target will depend on Bitcoin’s ability to retest the 10,500 price level. Currently, BTCUSD has stalled at 10,150 intraday. XRPUSD has shown a positive correlation with BTCUSD and generally adopts the price behaviour of the latter.
If the upside momentum fades, then we could be in for another retest of the support at 0.28408. Support areas also exist at 0.26754 and 0.25038. These could become relevant if the crypto markets enter into selling mode.