Crypto Community Predicts $XRP Price Increase as Whale Holdings Surge

The cryptocurrency community is predicting that the price of $XRP will move up in the near future to finish January close to the $0.40 mark, which would mean the cryptocurrency’s price would rise 14.3% from its current $0.346 level.

The figures come from CoinMarketCap’s price estimate feature, which saw over 1,300 users predict the cryptocurrency’s price for the end of the month. Looking at February, the cryptocurrency community expects XRP to trade at $0.399, up around 15.35% from current levels.

Source: CoinMarketCap

The price of $XRP has notably dropped from the $0.39 mark over the last 30 days amid a wider cryptocurrency market correction that saw other top cryptocurrencies lose some of their value. The market’s total capitalization has dropped by over $50 billion over the same period.

As CryptoGlobe reported, whale addresses on the $XRP Ledger, holding between 100,000 and 10 million tokens (between $34,000 and $3.4 million) have increased their holdings rapidly over the last five weeks, going from 16.7% of the cryptocurrency’s supply to 18.3%.

XRP whales started adding to their holdings at the end of September and early October, when the price of the cryptocurrency started surging as both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple Labs started looking to end their legal battle.

The SEC sued Ripple and two of its executives in 2020, alleging they sold unregistered securities when they issued $1.3 billion worth of XRP tokens. Ripple denies XRP is a security.

Earlier this year, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse noted that he believed the company would prevail in its legal battle against the regulator. Over the past few weeks, a number of influential cryptocurrency firms, including Coinbase and the Blockchain Association, filed to support Ripple.

In a recent reply in support of a motion for summary judgment, Ripple’s lawyers argued that the regulator has failed to show that any offer or sale of XRP was an investment contract under federal securities laws.

Ripple’s lawyers added that even for transactions “that involved an exchange of money,” the SEC failed to “show that purchasers invested that money in a common enterprise” rather than “simply buying an asset,” as the Howey test requires.

Ripple settling the lawsuit could lead to an XRP supply shock, which presumably would lead to a price surge as demand would remain the same, while supply plunged. That’s according to legal expert and XRP supporter Jeremy Hogan, who has been following the case.

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