The past few days have been a good ride, especially for Bitcoin as the price seems to finally go up after a long crypto winter. Being the market leader, Bitcoin’s price changes usually affect the whole crypto market. As such, Bitcoin’s current price surge has left the majority of altcoins in the green. However, two particular cryptos seem to defy the trend. XRP and XLM (Stellar Lumens) are still in the red.
Possible XRP Consolidation?
Since August 2018, XRP has largely been swinging between $0.29 and $0.31, with a lot of buying pressure experienced around the $0.28 mark. However, despite the crypto mounting a small recovery after last week’s market slump, XRP is yet to catch on the general bullish trend currently pushing the rest of the market.
The fact that XRP’s price hasn’t entirely crashed or surged astronomically indicates that it might be going through a consolidation period where the price achieves relative stability over a period before a surge finally happens.
Stellar Lumens (XLM)
XLM is another crypto that hasn’t quite performed to the investors’ expectations over the last week. The crypto has experienced buying pressure mounting at around $0.092 over the past week. The price action has also tested the new $0.10 resistance, a key area that was formerly XLM’s support.
Could It Be A Decoupling?
First off, the fact that there are cryptos now breaking away from the general influence caused by Bitcoin’s price action suggests a possible decoupling from Bitcoin’s ripple effect. Normally, any change in Bitcoin’s price effects a market-wide change, the latest of which effects can be noticed from the current market situation.
However, on the part of XRP, it can be argued that the price stagnation is mostly as a result of Ripple’s continued release of a lot XRP into the market. Every month, about 1 billion XRP is released from an escrow account set up by Ripple. A portion of this amount is sold while the remainder is returned to escrow. On May 1st, Ripple marked the start of the month by effecting an XRP escrow release.
