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Michael Arrington has published a tweet to comment on the mammoth growth seen by XRP as it managed to surpass the $2 price level on Sunday.
The TechCrunch founder issued a short message to his X followers: “XRP is a beast.”
XRP is a beast.
— Michael Arrington 🏴☠️ (@arrington) December 2, 2024
XRP soars above $2, reclaiming top three market cap spot
From Thursday of last week until earlier today, the Ripple-affiliated cryptocurrency XRP has stunned the crypto market and the XRP community with an unprecedented 70.55% price surge as it went up from $1.42. On Sunday, XRP finally succeeded in surpassing $2, hitting $2.42 earlier today. After a roughly 10% drop that followed, XRP has put up a small recovery and is changing hands at $2.30 per coin.
XRP has also managed to retake third place on the popular CoinMarketCap website, with the coin’s market capitalization figure skyrocketing to almost $140 billion. By now, though, XRP has been pushed one position back by Tether’s USDT stablecoin.
Whales scoop up $1.66 billion XRP
According to the report published on X by the popular Santiment on-chain data aggregator, XRP skyrocketed to $2.49 for the first time since Jan. 8, 2018, setting a nearly seven-year price peak. Meanwhile, large wallets that hold between one and ten million XRP have purchased close to 680 million XRP coins, worth $1.66 billion at the time of the tweet's publication. Aside from that, nonempty XRP wallets acquired roughly 5.5 million XRP for the first time ever in the history of XRP’s existence.
🚀 XRP has skyrocketed to an astounding $2.49 market value for the first time since January 8, 2018. The 6-year (nearly 7-year) high comes as wallets with 1M-10M XRP have accumulated 679.1M tokens (currently worth $1.66B) in just 3 weeks. Also, total non-empty XRP wallets have… pic.twitter.com/bIsfOqdCQX
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) December 2, 2024
Besides, as covered by U.Today, on Dec. 1, Ripple conducted a massive regular XRP release as it withdrew one billion coins from escrow and then traditionally locked 800 million back.
The astounding XRP price surge took place soon after the current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, announced that he would resign in January next year. Experts believe that the price rally was also fueled by expectations of the U.S. presidential administration planning to introduce adequate cryptocurrency regulation next year, which would allow crypto companies to finally start working fearlessly in the U.S., without the SEC taking them to court on allegations of offering/trading unregistered securities.
This was the case with the SEC and Ripple in December 2020, when the regulator began the long-running case against Ripple and its top executives – Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen.