What’s new with Ripple (XRP)?

The company recently made headlines for receiving another honor. Juniper Research, an agency specializing in providing in-depth market research and strategic insights in the field of digital technology, awarded Ripple the Platinum Award for Best Cross-Border Payment Platform for 2024.

Previously, Ripple won the PAY360 Award, a major award in the UK payment field, and Fortune magazine listed it as one of the top 50 technology workplaces in 2023.

The company’s upcoming stablecoin, RLUSD, has also made some progress, with Ripple minting and destroying thousands of tokens during its private beta testing phase over the past few weeks.

Recently, the XRP Ledger amendment to allow tokens like RLUSD (clawbacks) to be used in AMMs (automated market makers) “has passed code review”. They believe that the next step involves “some polish and merging into a new Rippled version for validators to vote on.”

Despite these developments, XRP has continued to underperform. In early October, XRP fell into double digits to around $0.51 as the SEC appealed its 2023 ruling against Ripple. Currently, the token is valued at around $0.52 (according to CoinGecko), down 9.5% in two weeks.

The ups and downs of SHIB

The popular meme coin briefly ranked among the best performing cryptocurrencies yesterday (October 9). Its strong (albeit short-lived) growth coincided with a plunge in SHIB exchange reserves and a surge in its burn rate of more than 400%. However, short sellers stepped in and the asset’s price fell sharply today (October 10).

Despite the heightened volatility, multiple analysts expect good days ahead. Not long ago, the price pattern had formed a specific triangle that, if broken to the upside, could see a 130% rally. On the contrary, ultra-optimistic targets like $0.01 are essentially impossible:

“I’ve heard people say they bought SHIB because if it only goes to 1c in the next year then they’ll be millionaires. With SHIB’s current market cap that’s almost impossible. Learn how to value a token by market cap vs. price.”

BTC has not yet reached “Uptober”

Many members of the crypto community expect the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to surge significantly throughout October as the month has historically been quite successful for the industry as a whole.

However, the primary cryptocurrency had a bad start to the month, falling from $65,000 in late September to $60,000 a few days later. It recovered some of its losses, rising to nearly $64,000 on Oct. 7 before falling again. Currently, BTC is trading at around $61,000, down 5% in the past two weeks.

Some market observers believe that the asset may soon return to the green. BTC has broken out of a descending wedge pattern on the weekly chart and escaped from a 6-month descending channel. Therefore, they predict that a “bounce from here” may be possible.