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Recent market dynamics have led to the XRP price surges past the psychological limit of $1 for the first time since 2021. This marked a major milestone for the XRP price, which has traded below $0.6 for most of the past three years.
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The rally, driven by key market dynamics and specific holder activity, highlights the role of strategic accumulation by major stakeholders. Data about the chain in particular shows a intriguing trend among whalessharks and retail wallets.
XRP Price Breakthrough to $1.26: Whale and Shark Accumulation Drives a Rise
The XRP price rose to $1.26 on Binance, reaching a level not seen since November 11, 2021. This three-year high comes amid a broader cryptocurrency market rally, but XRP price growth is tied to the strategic moves of key stakeholders and a expected change in US SEC leadership.
According to on Santiment’s on-chain analytics platform, large XRP holders, particularly wallets holding between 1 million and 100 million tokens, have played a major role in this outbreak. This cohort of holders mainly consists of the shark and whale categories. That is, semi-large and large XRP holders.
XRP whale and shark wallets have collectively amassed 453.3 million XRP tokens in the past week alone, bringing their total holdings to approximately 18% of the total supply of XRP. At the current average XRP price, this accumulation is worth approximately $526.3 million. The accumulation of whale and shark portfolios is no coincidence. As Santiment noted, history shows that large-scale acquisitions by market participants tend to signal bullish sentiment and often precede sustained price increases.
Interestingly, while whales and sharks have been accumulating XRP, retailers have been throwing away their assets. Santiment reported that wallets holding less than 1 million XRP collectively sold 75.7 million tokens last week, worth approximately $87.9 million. However, most of these discharges have been picked up by shark and whale portfolios to essentially counteract the negative effects of the dumps.
Image from X: Santiment
What’s next for XRP?
XRP’s massive price increase has seen the cryptocurrency displace Dogecoin in the market cap rankings and regain its position as the sixth largest asset. The XRP price is up about 11% over the past 24 hours, while the Dogecoin price is down about 7%.
At the time of writing, XRP has retreated slightly from its three-year high of $1.26 and is currently trading at $1.06. Nevertheless, there is still bullish sentiment around XRP, especially if the sharks and whales can stay above the $1 mark. This in turn will lead to concurrent retailing FUD which will drive more growth.
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According to crypto analyst Egrag Crypto, the next bullish move is for the XRP price to close above $1.10 on the current weekly candlestick.
Featured image of DALL-E, chart from TradingView