Ripple prices continued to spiral on Tuesday morning, driven by a sudden change in how the currency’s price is calculated. At the time of writing, the XRP to USD exchange rate was down 8.83%.
CoinMarketCap’s exclusion of Korean exchanges started the entire fiasco.
The popular web site omitted Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit from global averages, claiming that Korean prices are shady outliers with no business being included.
It’s true that Korean bids are extremely high. Even yesterday, Bithumb registered an average XRP price of $3.48, while Bitfinex clocked in at $2.36. That is not normal.
Properly functioning markets do not have such obvious arbitrage opportunities. It stands to reason that someone would close the gap—by buying on cheap exchanges and selling on pricey ones—or at least bring it down to reasonable levels.
The absence of such a correction is troubling. It’s also mystifying. So in the spirit of “better safe than sorry,” CoinMarketCap stopped adding Korean exchanges to its calculation. Although the change applied to all cryptocurrencies, XRP suffered the greatest damage.
To be clear, Korean exchanges didn’t vanish into the mist—CoinMarketCap simply dropped them because their prices were far above the averages.
I happen to think this is amazing Ripple news.
Many investors were kicking themselves for not investing in XRP. I have received emails from people who watched sadly from the sidelines as XRP took flight in December, rising from $0.25 to more than $3.50. Fortunes were made, millionaires minted.
But it’s easy to feel regret when things are going well. Now that XRP prices have dropped, however, will those investors take advantage of the buying opportunity? Nothing has changed in Ripple’s fundamentals—it remains an extremely promising angle on blockchain.
Analyst Take
In the months preceding Ripple’s recent surge, we explained that Ripple was much more interesting than Bitcoin, Dash, or whatever currency play had caught investors’ imagination that week. We continue to believe that. As such, we maintain our $10.00 Ripple price prediction for 2018.
Read more at:
www.profutconfidential.com
