The XRP (Ripple) price pump, scheduled for today at 8:30 AM EST, failed.
The goal was to suddenly and artificially drive up the price of XRP by buying en masse all at the same time, 8:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (New York time).
The initiative was sparked by the now-famous Reddit community WallStreetBets, but it wasn’t supported by the group’s moderators, as it was actually an initiative of a few members.
However, on the dedicated Telegram group, t.me/pumpxrp, almost 200,000 people had joined, so it was expected that it might have had some effect.
In fact, between 8:30 and 8:32 AM the price rose slightly, from $0.57 to $0.62, but then it literally collapsed to below $0.4, before stabilising again between $0.40 and $0.45.
In the past few days, it had been rising sharply.
XRP’s pump preceded by a rise
Prior to the announcement of the pump attempt, the price hovered around $0.30, but by January 30th it had already risen to almost $0.50. Yesterday, after a brief descent to below $0.40, the XRP rose to almost $0.50.
Over the course of the night, however, it began to rise again, first to almost $0.60, then to almost $0.70, and then to a high of almost $0.75 about two hours before the pump was due to start.
After reaching that figure, however, it began to fall, first to $0.55 and then back down to around $0.60, the price it was at when the pump was supposed to start.
Instead of rising, it fell.
In other words, the expectation of a possible pump convinced many people to buy well before 8:30 AM EST on February 1st, while a few minutes after the start of the pump attempt many started to sell.
It cannot be ruled out that the promoters of the initiative took advantage of the huge expectations that they were able to generate, buying XRP even before the pump attempt was announced, and then sold at a profit perhaps to those who decided to take part in the initiative by buying only at 8:30 AM EST today.