In the chaotic aftermath of last week’s market-wide wipeout, one detailed forensic examination stands out: the depth of the order book on major trading venues has thinned to ‘air’, allowing relatively modest market orders to rip through price levels with virtually no resistance.
The phenomenon, captured by independent market analyst Dom (@traderview2) on It’s not a prediction; it is an explanation of how prices, liquidity and matching engines behave under stress.
XRP price can reach a difference of $1.19 or $20
Doms after Reconstructing the XRP leg of the move uses Binance Futures’ order book depth to illustrate the dynamics. “The depth of the
The hour when everything broke was different. “Look carefully before 9pm on that first leg down, almost $20 million has been sold on the market (shorts coming in / longs being liquidated). The bid side (blue) goes from $50 million to almost zero… At this point XRP is almost $2.50, with all liquidity below that effectively gone, air.” Minutes later, as “more sales… trickled into what was essentially an air-pocketed book,” the price dropped from “$2.50 to $1.19. No one replenished the book. The middle managers withdrew or simply walked away to protect. These markets really are more fragile than most think,” he wrote.
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The same thread and follow-ups broadened the lens to multi-site behavior. Dom highlighted a striking difference on the Dogecoin tape: “DOGE brought $0.09 to $0.09 on Binance, OKX, Bybit and Kraken… Coinbase was trading more than 40% higher. Their market makers either had a completely different playbook or were protecting the books. That difference was not random and someone kept the floor intact.” The implication is not that aggressive buyers or sellers “controlled the movement,” but that quote providers – market-making algorithms with the discretion to pull or revise quotes – dictated where executable liquidity actually existed as prices diverged.
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This formulation also answers a common post-mortem question from traders staring at cumulative volume delta (CVD) prints that went vertical even as prices fell: Net buying pressure can rise while the price is still falling if the best offers are snatched away in milliseconds and quoted lower again, forcing buyers to chase falling demand.
As Dom put it in a separate explanation on DOGE: “Liquidity was cut and repriced in milliseconds, over and over again. It doesn’t matter how much you buy. The nearest demand is sliding down faster and faster than you can reach it… The price isn’t falling because of ‘selling’ – it’s falling because the land itself keeps disappearing. […] My analysis so far supports the case that this happened to many coins…’
The logic is symmetrical: when price liquidity disappears above price, upward gaps can be mechanically as abrupt as downward air pockets. Hence Dom’s response to the question of whether there could be a spike from $2 to $10 or even $20 “on the way up”: “Technically, yes.”
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $2.46.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com