Crypto
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Ripple
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple (Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images)
Ripple effect

Ripple’s XRP rallies as South Korean retail traders pile in

The cryptocurrency had a trading volume of more than $926 million in the last 24 hours on South Korean centralized exchange Upbit, making XRP the most-traded token on the platform.

Sage D. Young

XRP is starting off the week as the best performer among major cryptocurrencies, aided by its popularity among retail investors in South Korea. 

The token has rallied about 10% in the last 24 hours to trade hands at the $2.60 threshold, giving it a market capitalization of almost $149 billion, behind only bitcoin and ethereum of all cryptocurrencies. The last time XRP touched $2.60 was in March.

“XRP price outperforming was underpinned by the settlement announcement on May 8 between the SEC and Ripple Labs, including founders Bradley Garlinghouse and Christian A. Larsen,” Julio Moreno, research head of blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant, told Sherwood News. “This caused the XRP price to rally further.” 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a settlement agreement last Thursday to resolve its civil enforcement action against Ripple Labs, bringing closer the end of a legal showdown that has persisted for years

The token’s rally comes amid increased trading volume. Across the exchanges tracked by CoinGecko, the token’s 24-hour trading volume stands at $8.7 billion. Just a week ago, its volume was sitting around $1.4 billion. 

Dave Siemer, cofounder and CEO of Wave Digital Assets, told Sherwood, “The favorable SEC settlement has removed a massive cloud that hung over XRP for years, essentially giving the green light to investors who’ve been sitting on the sidelines.”

He continued, “What makes this particularly potent is that it lands in the context of South Korea’s unique and enduring enthusiasm for XRP.” On South Korean centralized exchange Upbit, XRP is the most-traded cryptocurrency, with over $926 million in volume in the last 24 hours, accounting for about 22% of the exchange’s overall volume. 

Upbit is one of the largest exchanges by XRP reserves, “which is why there’s large trading volumes on the platform,” Moreno added. Per CryptoQuant, 5.9 billion XRP tokens sit on Upbit, equivalent to $14 billion at the current prices. 

Siemer said, “South Korean traders have maintained remarkable loyalty to XRP despite the SEC case, with Upbit consistently seeing XRP volumes surpass even bitcoin.”

Similarly, Maksim Tkachuk, an analyst at market intelligence platform Santiment, told Sherwood that XRP’s recent uptick in part stems from “Korean degens coming together and agreeing upon a consensus play.” 

Elsewhere, on HyperLiquid, a blockchain known for its derivatives exchange, one crypto whale placed several transactions longing XRP with 2x leverage, according to crypto data firm Nansen. The address 0x175 transacted four times (Tx1, Tx2, Tx3, and Tx4) on Monday to increase its total size position to more 8.8 million XRP worth nearly $23 million.


Sage D. Young is a crypto journalist who’s written for CoinDesk and Unchained.

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

crypto

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.