The price of XRP has jumped by more than 50% in the last 24 hours as the cryptocurrency’s community has rallied to support the token through a petition, and the Spark (FLR) token airdropped to holders has started trading on exchanges.
The price of XRP dropped after the U.S. Securities and Exchange commission’s (SEC) announced, on December 22, it was filing a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and two of its executives alleging that they “raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”
The lawsuit announcement saw the price of XRP start dropping, but the plunge was then accelerated by a plethora of delisting announcements from major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bitstamp, Coinbase, Binance.US, Bittrex, and others. Asset managers, market makers, wallets, and brokers soon stopped supporting XRP as well.
On top of that, the price had been inflated thanks to Flare network’s Spark (FLR) token airdrop in early December. Data shows that once rumors of the lawsuit started circulating, XRP dropped from about $0.60 to a low of $0.18 before recovering.
In the last 24 hours, it moved from $0.22 to $0.345 at press time, up over 50%.
The price of the cryptocurrency seemingly did not recover over any news related to the SEC lawsuit against Ripple, but instead because of the community rallying behind it. As CryptoGlobe reported, over 36,000 XRP supporters have asked the United States government to recognize XRP as a currency in a petition.
The petition seemingly seeks to counter the SEC’s claim by asking the federal government to intervene and evaluate XRP as a currency. Moreover, while various trading platforms delisted XRP as a preventive move, crypto exchange Uphold affirmed it will keep XRP listed until the lawsuit is resolved.
Uphold added it trusts other cryptocurrency exchanges to “adopt a similar stance rather than rushing to judgement ahead of the court’s decision.”
It further pointed out that the SEC’s goal is to protect consumers, and believes it’s hard to see “how a judgement rendering XRP essentially worthless and inflicting billions of dollars of losses on retail investors” would square with that goal.
Finally, crypto exchange Bitrue has listed an FLR/XRP trading pair. The pair allows FLR token holders, which are also XRP supporters as the tokens were airdropped to those holding the cryptocurrency, to sell their tokens.
The price of FLR has steadily been dropping, which seems to show traders are, conservatively, trading their FLR for XRP.
In December, Flare network airdropped FLR tokens to XRP holders at a ratio of 1.0073 FLR per XRP token investors had. A total of 45,827,728,412 tokens will be distributed. The Flare Network itself integrates the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and does not derive safety from a token.
It essentially brings Ethereum’s decentralized applications, smart contracts, and decentralized finance into the XRP ecosystem. It’s supported by Ripple’s investment arm RippleX, formerly Xpring.
Featured image via Pixabay.
