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One of the sharpest activity collapses in the XRP Ledger’s recent history was just printed. The network has now lost about 90% of that activity in less than a day after reaching a two-billion-plus daily payment volume, the second-largest spike in a full 365-day period. The number of payments decreased from almost 880,000 transactions to a small portion of that, following a similar pattern.
XRP still going down
A network typically indicates one of two things when it posts an extreme vertical spike and then quickly retraces: a sizable one-time settlement flow that is not indicative of continuous, organic use, or an overheated spike in programmatic or bot-driven transactions that quickly subsided. Both are conceivable for XRP, but neither resolves the more general issue shown on the chart.
With lower highs and lower lows unaltered, XRP’s price is still trapped below a clear declining channel. The price is currently hovering near $2.16, just above the lower trendline that has already been tested several times — after failing to break the channel midrange. The RSI is muted, volume is dropping and the 50-, 100- and 200-day moving averages are all sloping downward above the price, all of which are indicators of weak momentum and structural bearish pressure.
Does activity matter?
Furthermore, the chart was unaffected by that enormous spike in activity. Bulls should be alerted if the network prints one of its busiest processing days of the year and the price shows no reaction at all. It implies that rather than a fundamental change in utility or demand, the market saw the surge as noise. This is further supported by the decline in payment activity.
Persistence is demonstrated by a healthy expansion, which is characterized by several days or weeks of high usage that are progressively mirrored in liquidity and price behavior. The opposite was produced by XRP: a vacuum followed by a vertical explosion.
With XRP rejecting every significant resistance level for months and network metrics sharply declining, the most likely result is still continued drift toward the channel’s lower boundary. The market has little incentive to change course unless XRP can maintain $2.00 and begin to carve higher lows with steady on-chain demand, rather than one-day anomalies.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team