Is the price of XRP (Ripple) being hurt by speculation of possible new delistings?
Previous Ripple (XRP) delistings
What is certain is that delisting XRP from various exchanges in the past has had a negative impact on the price.
Particularly in December of last year, when the SEC case against Ripple had just been filed, the delisting on major exchanges such as Coinbase generated a lot of fear, and the price dropped from $0.58 to $0.22 in a matter of weeks.
In those same weeks, Bitcoin’s mini-speculative bubble had begun to swell and only burst between mid-April and mid-May of this year, so the collapse of XRP was really anomalous.
The rise of XRP
However, starting in late January, the price of XRP also started to rise again, reaching an annual high on 15 April at over $1.8. On the same day, the price of Bitcoin hit a new all-time high at around $64,000.
What happened in the following months seems to reveal that XRP’s difficulties did not end then.
In fact, Bitcoin spiked two more times in the following months to new all-time highs, most notably to $69,000 in November.
By contrast, XRP never again managed to rise above the $1.8 level of April.
XRP’s price spiked two more times during 2021, but in early September it stopped below $1.4, and in early November it stopped below $1.3.
The inability to make new annual highs during the bull runs following the April 2021 bull run, halting at the resistance 20% below the April peak, does indeed seem to suggest that there is something suppressing the price of XRP.
It might therefore be fair to say that Ripple’s cryptocurrency is being pressured by fears of further delisting.
On the other hand, trading of XRP has not yet been rehabilitated on Coinbase, and depending on the outcome of the SEC lawsuit, there may or may not be any more delistings.
In other words, at the moment its price seems to be “hanging” on the outcome of this lawsuit, which could, however, be resolved in early 2022.
XRP today
It is worth noting that the current price of XRP, around $0.8, is not much higher than the price it had reached in November last year before the news of this lawsuit. In fact, on 25 November 2020 it was close to $0.7, so much so that the price has only increased by 15% since then, while that of Bitcoin, for example, has more than doubled.
It is therefore no coincidence that, after having reached second place overall among the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization in January 2019, XRP has now slipped to eighth place, trailing Polkadot, and not far ahead of Avalanche and Terra. Even Dogecoin could risk overtaking it in this respect in case of a new spike.
