crypto has been crashing but xrp has held up better than most although its price has also fallen in recent weeks it’s still up almost five times and has shown signs of strength while other altcoins have been collapsing and this might have something to do with the fact that Trump announced that xrp would be included as part of the US strategic crypto reserve and that Pro crypto regulations in the US could benefit xrp the most and that’s why today we’re going to bring you up to on everything xrp has been up to take a close look at its price action and where it could be headed next my name is Nick and if you hold xrp this is a video you have to watch Until the End first things first I need to make it clear that nothing in this video is financial advice it’s educational content intended to inform you about xrp also do note that nobody at the coin Bureau team holds xrp as part of their crypto portfolio but some other members in the coin team do hold altcoins in xrp’s ecosystem and if you want to know only about 3 months since we last covered xrp but a lot has happened happened since then for context the last time we covered xrp was in the early December Trump had been elected Gary Gensler had announced he would be stepping down from the SEC and the future for crypto was looking very bright future so bright right if only it had stayed that way hey anyway shortly after that video went live a publicly traded company called workspot announced that it had added both xrp and BTC to its reserves and what’s interesting is that workspot CEO Stephan Rossy said the company purchased both BTC and xrp because of their growing adoption and potential to store value in other words a publicly traded company sees xrp as been on the same level as BTC and that’s big unfortunately this news seems to have been overshadowed by the 60 Minutes interview with ripple CEO Brad garlinghouse that aired a few days later what’s even more unfortunate is that the interview was very hostile towards crypto and didn’t even address the elephant in the room the sec’s case against Ripple maybe the interview was filmed back when Biden was still in office I mean who knows now fortunately the news of the 60 Minutes interview was overshadowed by something even bigger that was actually very bullish and that was the launch of Ripple’s RL USD stable coin in mid December as most of you will know RL USD is a fully regulated stable coin issued by Ripple that exists on The xrp Ledger xrp’s blockchain and also on ethereum what you may not know though is that there was recently a massive increase in RL USD Supply on ethereum we’ll come back to that a bit later now in case xrp’s price action didn’t make it clear enough January was a very bullish month first Ripple partnered with chain link to support RL usd’s use in defi then Mega Bank JP Morgan put out a report predicting that spot xrp ETFs would experience enormous inflows once they were approved by the SEC shortly after that Ono Finance announced that it would be tokenized in real world assets on The xrp Ledger a ripple also announced that it had secured a money transmitter license in New York and Texas which is huge for RL usd’s adoption and yet it seems that everyone missed an even more bullish announcement and this was the website for the CME showing that the exchange would soon list futures for xrp and soul although the CME later claimed it was just a test site or whatever the fact that CME futures for soul are set to go live this week suggests that xrp could be next for reference it’s believed that CME Futures will help spot altcoin ETFs get approved given that they were a de facto prerequisite for spot BTC and eth ETFs February was when things started to get a bit messy for xrp at the beginning of the month The xrp Ledger experienced an outage that lasted for exactly 64 minutes and this is a bit concerning given that the blockchain also experienced an outage in November 2024 something that was only revealed in January this year uh the February outage appears to have been caused by the same thing as the November outage a bug thankfully a load of bullish news about the spot xrp ETF subsequently hit the wires with the CBOE bzx exchange filing with the SEC to list the spot xrp ETFs and poly Market bets saying there’s an 80% chance that the xrp ETFs will be approved on that note some of you might also have heard that Ripple helped with the launch of Trump’s mecoin back in January in short Ripple and other crypto companies loaned crypto to Fiat Gateway moonay $160 million to ensure it process purchases of the mem coin during that absolute frenzy speaking of which zamon the most popular wallet in xrp’s ecosystem subsequently announced that its more than 1 million users could seamlessly buy both xrp and RL USD via moonpay as we highlighted in our previous xrp update zamon is going to be crucial for xrp Success during this crypto bull market as it will turn millions of xrp holders into xrp users and unlock the full potential potential of xrp’s ecosystem that reminds me another thing that we mentioned in that update was that a new xrpl Foundation had been Incorporated in France and what’s fascinating is that as of February the current xrpl Foundation is in the process of migrating all of its assets to this new entity including the migration of the unique node list or UNL and FYI the UNL is a list of the 35 trusted nodes on xrp which process most XR P transactions so uh it’s pretty important the reason why this is so fascinating is because attitudes towards crypto in the US have pulled a complete 180 degree turn under the Trump Administration and yet xrp continues to expand its reach overseas again this migration to France could be a relic of the anti-crypto era under Biden but the fact that Ripple continues publishing blog posts about its European expansion suggests it’s still very much focused on the overseas Market anyhow earlier this month Trump announced that the US would create a strategic crypto Reserve which would include xrp Soul adaa BTC eth and apparently a bunch of other yet unspecified cryptos not surprisingly all of these cryptos exploded on the news what is surprising is that everyone seems to have forgotten about what Trump actually had in mind when it came to this strategic crypto Reserve if you actually go back and read Trump’s executive order about crypto from from January you’ll see that it specifies that the Strategic crypto Reserve would be quote potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the federal government through its law enforcement efforts put simply it wouldn’t involve purchasing any cryptos with taxpayer dollars uh just keeping the ones the US government already has and this was clarified at the recent crypto Summit at the White House and the consensus seems to be that it was another nothing Burger however some would argue that it’s in fact a triple bacon cheeseburger because it essentially confirms that xrp has actual value in the eyes of the US government treasury secretary Scott bessent actually specified that these cryptos would be counted among the US government’s Assets Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for xrp’s Price action and its future potential believe it or not but xrp has effectively been trading sideways since we last covered it in early December we correctly predicted that $3 would be xrp’s local top don’t get too excited though we were actually wrong about the actual Catalyst now we thought it would be the launch of RL USD it was actually Trump’s Inauguration in any case this begs the question of what comes next the honest answer is that It ultimately depends on the macro not sure if you’ve noticed but uncertainty around things like Trump’s tariffs have created lots of volatility in the markets and that’s fundament why xrp has been trading sideways for weeks if macro conditions improve xrp could break out to the upside if they get worse well Look Out Below at the time of shooting xrp is hovering around $2 which is not only a key psychological level but also happens to be exactly where the Ballinger band moving average on the weekly is as you might have guessed this is a critical level that has historically served as a strong support for large altcoins and if macro conditions improve xrp should Bounce from this level and retest $3 before rallying higher if macro conditions get worse however then the not so subtle Head and Shoulders pattern on the weekly chart could in fact play out and if this happens and xrp breaks significantly below $2 then it could fall as low as 80 cents such a large drop at this stage would be unprecedented but some would say this cycle has already been unprecedented in so many ways it’s really been a truly bizarre cycle regardless it’s important to note that even if the macro conditions improve xrp is going to require some kind of catalyst to take its price higher you can think of the macro as being the fuel and the Catalyst being the spark that lights the fire so far macro has been pouring water on the wood instead of fuel and the result is that no spark managed to start a fire for xrp or indeed any other crypto lately but let’s suppose that macro conditions improve what are the catalysts that could cause xrp to Rally from our perspective there are two and the first would be the approval of the spot xrp ETFs the second catalyst is a bit less obvious and it’s one that we underscored in our previous update the upcoming evm side chain for xrp uh to bring you up to speed companies in xrp’s ecosystem have been working on a cosmos based evm compatible side chain for a couple of years now one of these companies is called Pier and they recently announced that the test net for xrp’s evm side chain would soon be live this suggests that the main net launch could occur in the coming months of course this will be incredibly bullish for xrp because it will make it possible to do things like borrow against xrp in defi something that many xrp whales would love to do because it means they wouldn’t have to sell and most of this borrowing would likely involve RL USD and it will significantly increase liquid in xrp’s ecosystem in fact xlr’s co-founder predicts that RL USD on xrp’s evm side chain will create enormous demand for xrp quote when you do those transfers you pay for gas in xrp so the xrp holders are still going to benefit because you burn some xrp every time you do a transaction according to coin Telegraph he said that most of RL USD Supply would end up on the evm side chain and this this ties into what I mentioned earlier the sudden increase in RL USD Supply on ethereum in our view this could be preparation for the launch of the xrp evm side chain as there’s presumably going to be lots of liquidity flowing between said side chain and other evm compatible chains especially ethereum lo and behold most of this newly minted RL USD seems to be going to dexas as liquidity in some then there are at least two catalysts that could cause xrp to explode to the upside in the short to medium term assuming macro conditions improve of course and this begs the bigger question and that’s what the Catalyst will be that takes xrp to its cycle top and if you watched our previous video you’ll know we believe that xrp could rise as high as $7 by the end of the year though it could be closer to $5 whatever the case the rally to all-time highs will require some kind of catalyst at this stage there only seem to be two candidates the first is the exop Ledger Apex event in mid June but this assumes that the crypto Market will Top sometime over the summer the other candidate is the approval of the spot xrp ETFs which is expected to occur sometime in the Autumn more about that right over here now whether xrp could rally as high as $7 also depends on its other upcoming milestones and you’ll recall that we’ve discussed a few of these already such as the launch of the xrp evm side chain for example additional Milestones were detailed by Ripple as part of its push into quote institutional defi which will focus on tokenized real world assets including RL USD Ripple’s institutional defi road map was posted in February as you can see it includes a series of amendments I.E changes that will need to be made to the xrp blockchain some of which were recently implemented and others which are currently in progress Ripple’s president Monica long has noted in interviews that Ripple strategy is to make it possible to tokenize assets on xrp store those assets with ripple in custody and exchange this onchain value using RL USD as you can imagine RL USD has been a focus for ripple ever since it launched and there are a lot of Milestones related to it that we didn’t mention in our previous update these include RL USD launching on more blockchains a listing on more exchanges and expanding its use in payments Ripple’s Executives have noted that it will be complimentary to xrp in these contexts not only that but in a recent interview Monica specified that Ripple is planning on acquiring multiple companies to accelerate RL usd’s expansion and this relates to something that Brad mentioned in a recent interview and that’s that Ripple is no longer planning on doing an IPO because they apparently don’t require any additional funding FYI Ripple is somehow famous for having no shortage of cash on hand and this might have something to do with the fact that Ripple was gifted 80% of xrp Supply shortly after its main net launched and and has been slowly selling this xrp ever since before you freak out you should know that Ripple voluntarily escrowed this xrp back in 2017 in Practical terms this means that 1 billion xrp is unlocked every month and whatever xrp Ripple doesn’t use gets locked up again and added to the end of the escrow well it looks like Ripple has been selling lots of xrp lately because xrp’s circulating supply has grown by more than 1 billion over the last 3 months according to historical data from coin market cap assuming an average price of around $2.5 this means that Ripple has made as much as $2.5 billion selling xrp though I should note that just because this xrp was claimed doesn’t necessarily mean it was sold even so this is scary when you consider that Ripple CTO David Schwarz said that quote Ripple can Will and should act in its own interest you should not expect Ripple to act in your interest to the detriment of its own interest or those of its shareholders and this was in response to a recent post that said that Ripple was free to dump on xrp holders whenever it was because xrp is not a security anymore and this of course brings me to the challenges that we foresee for xrp the first challenge is something that many xrp holders are hyper aware of and that’s competition coming from RL USD Once Upon a Time xrp was supposed to be used as a bridge currency in cross border payments it was going to be the next competitor to Swift Today Ripple is slowly but surely pivoting to using RL USD exactly like we warned in our last video switching from xrp to RL USD is arguably in the interests of Ripple and its shareholders and that’s just because Ripple could earn large passive revenues from RL usd’s reserves just like other stable coin issuers do logically then this creates a large incentive to grow RL USD as much as possible and this comes at the expense of xrp Ripple will acquire companies to grow RL usd’s adoption and they will likely sell xrp to do it and this ties into the Second Challenge and that’s competition more broadly a ripple faces no shortage of competition from larger stable coin issuers and xrp faces no shortage of competition from other layer ones even though it is launching an evm compatible side chain to be more competitive this is probably something that should have been done in the uh previous cycle as we noted in our previous update more importantly the fact that xrp ledger has experienced not one but two outages over the last few months probably does not inspire a lot of confidence from institutions looking to tokenize assets on chain when it comes to tokenization security is Paramount and this is precisely why asset managers like Black Rock have been issuing most of their tokenized rwas on ethereum it is arguably the most secure crypto for this and this relates to the third Challenge and that’s adoption if institutions become hesitant to adopt xrp because of its blockchain’s recent outages then this leaves retail adoption in theory most of this retail adoption will happen on xrp’s evm side chain via userfriendly front ends like zamon this will give direct access to the evm side chains growing ecosystem of deps all of which can capture liquidity from other evm chains in practice however it’s possible that the evm side chain won’t be scalable enough to support this demand as we saw with ethereum in the previous cycle even a few 100,000 users can be enough to make a blockchain unusable even salana struggled with congestion issues for the longest time it’s still too soon to say but we’re not that optimistic about xrp’s evm side chain keeping up with all that said though these are challenges that are unlikely to affect xrp’s price in any meaningful way and that’s because they’re all hypothetical for the time being it’s too soon to say if RL USD will affect xrp in a negative way it’s too soon to say that xrp won’t be able to compete with other chains and it’s too soon to say that its evm side chain won’t handle the demand again these are just challenges that we foresee for xrp it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll materialize they’re just things to keep on your radar if you an xrp holder or someone who holds altcoins in xrp’s ecosystem though xrp may only pull another 2 to 3x from its current price some altcoins in its ecosystem could see 100x and you already know where to find Alpha about those the link will be down below and that’s it for today’s video but if you enjoyed it you may enjoy our latest one right over here and if you’re not subscribed to the channel yet you can do that right over here that’s me for now thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time
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