Following the Ripple partial victory over the SEC back in early July, the XRP price grew rapidly and climbed double-digits to secure a new yearly high. However, this has turned out to be short-lived as less than two months later, the cryptocurrency has once again succumbed to the bears. This has wiped out its gains after Judge Torres’s ruling and brought it back to pre-judgment levels.
Reason Behind The Price Decline
In a new report, Kaiko, a crypto market data provider, has revealed the reason behind the XRP price decline so far. The report takes an in-depth look into the activity of XRP holders across different regions and exchanges. This has led to a determination while the price has been on a never-ending downturn.
One of the first things that comes up in Keiko’s report is the amount of selling that investors have been doing. Its findings show that Asian investors have been involved in heavy selling. Most of this sell trend was recorded across exchanges such as Upbeat and OKX with very high sell pressure.
Sell volumes on offshore exchanges are high | Source: Kaiko
The sell trend seems to be so high with XRP trading volume topping exchanges in offshore exchanges. This selling pressure is so strong that it could not be offset by large buying that occurred in the US exchange Coinbase. The trade volumes for the altcoin on US exchanges also came out much lower than that of offshore exchanges.
“Overall, the share of XRP traded on U.S. markets remains lower than on offshore exchanges,” Kaiko said. “XRP is only the sixth most traded altcoin in the U.S. by cumulative trade volume while it tops the list on offshore markets.”
XRP fails to outperform despite high trading volumes | Source: Kaiko
XRP Price Underperforms In The Market
The Kaiko report also points out that the XRP price performed much worse compared to the other altcoins with which it competes in the top 10. While the decline was general for the crypto space, XRP’s performance was especially poor as it fell more than 25% in the month of August alone.
This decline in price also comes amid high interest and trading activity, doing twice as much volume compared to heavy hitters such as Binance’s BNB, Solana’s SOL, and even Dogecoin’s DOGE. Despite this, these altcoins were able to keep their August declines below 20%.
In addition to investors taking profits as the price surged, the events that followed the Ripple victory also contributed to the selling pressure. As the SEC already filed an interlocutory appeal, expectations are high that Ripple is about to get dragged into another prolonged court battle. History has already shown how the token will perform when this happens. So investors are already hedging their bets toward such an outcome.
Price returns to pre-judgment levels | Source: XRPUSD on Tradingview.com