blockworks.co
A notable uptick on Wednesday for XRP, currently positioned as the world’s fourth most valuable crypto, rounded off a two-day run, and capped its highest daily close this year.
XRP has recaptured its highest daily close this year, a milestone initially set one week ago in response to a judge’s ruling. The token briefly surged to an intraday high of $0.94, before correcting 28%.
As of 8:15 am ET, the asset is down slightly over the last 24 hours to $0.81, having clawed back 16% over 5 days from the previous weekend’s lows of $0.71, Blockworks Research data shows.
Derivatives for the asset have also exhibited a significant spike in open interest, with futures contracts remaining elevated at levels not seen since November 2021, Coinglass data shows.
Matt Long, General Manager of APAC at FalconX told Blockworks that, beginning last week, the firm’s Asia-Pacific clients have continued to be “constructive on XRP.”
“We have seen increasing demand from institutions for XRP OTC options and, in particular, topside calls,” he said.
It comes as other major blue chip digital assets remain muted, including bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) which remained little changed over 24 hours. XRP remains up 71% over the last seven days, CoinGecko data shows.
Prices of various altcoins surged following the decision on a three-year legal tussle between the SEC and Ripple Labs — stewards of XRP — that “programmatic” sales of the asset on crypto exchanges were not securities.
The development led to XRP’s most robust single-day performance since April 2017 — when the asset pumped more than 200% — and its second-biggest intraday rally in 10 years.
The token also managed to clinch the fourth spot in the market cap rankings ahead of Binance’s flagship token BNB for the first time in two years. XRP’s total market value now stands at $42.5 billion, compared to $38 billion for BNB.
Bradley Duke, chief strategy officer at ETC Group, told Blockworks the “best altcoins” were those designed with a “clear vision” to address a problem or service a particular use case, calling XRP “a good example of this.”
But Ripple — and by extension XRP — is not out of the legal woods just yet, according to Bill Hughes, senior counsel at ConsenSys. “It seems like the SEC would be the more likely party to want to have this decision reviewed immediately,” said Hughes during a recent Twitter Spaces discussion with The Tie, noting that in practice, that could take a year or more.