The Bitcoin or BTC price ironically has not been fluctuating much recently. Its value has been constantly stuck under $36,000 USD. The world’s most valued cryptocurrency was at its peak in April 2021. It was valued at over $60,000 USD from February to April this year. Since then the price has dropped by almost 40%. The price hike was due to Tesla and Coinbase. When Tesla announced that it had acquired 1.5 billion dollars worth of digital currency and the IPO of America’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, the prices of these entities shot up.
Meanwhile, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency Ripple or XRP, based in San Francisco, has seen only lows this past week. The price has dropped to -15% from the high of $0.73 USD. The price has stayed near 10 cents in the past week and with this, Ripple comes out as one of the weakest altcoins in recent times. This situation can be explained with the XRP vs SEC row.
What is happening between SEC and XRP?
The Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) had charged Ripple for handling $1.3 Billion Unregistered Securities Offering for seven years. Ripple disagrees with the allegation by stating that the company was “allowed” to circulate billions of XRP tokens. Two of Ripple’s top executives (co-founder and CEO) are also involved in this lawsuit. After the outbreak of this news, most of the major currency exchanges in the US had delisted XRP. This caused huge damage to the price of this altcoin. The motive of SEC is quite unclear as of now. We do not know if this will lead to a settlement or will drag on and on as a big case. No news has been shared between the XRP community and holders and enthusiasts are wondering if the case will proceed behind “closed doors”.
An anonymous exchange stated that it had approached the SEC in 2018 to clarify the security of XRP tokens. According to this exchange, SEC had not mentioned anything about the illegality of the XRP token and it took it as a green signal to list the crypto in their platform.
This case is a major reason for why XRP price dropped.
XRP vs Bitcoin
A few months ago, there were talks about how XRP will replace Bitcoin by the year 2024. Seems like that is not quite the situation now. Bitcoin was developed as a decentralised currency with an aim to pay for goods and services. It operates on a blockchain and acts as a medium of exchange also known as currency. The fundamental construction of Bitcoin is a blockchain that is more of a public ledger used for decentralised record keeping.
On the other hand, XRP was mainly created as a means to pay for bank settlements. Moreover like a money transfer system or a currency exchange to be a system of direct asset transfers in real-time. It is a safer and faster alternative to existing payment methods. The XRP was used for payment settlement, asset exchange and remittance systems used by banks and financial intermediaries.
This difference between the nature of Ripple and Bitcoin is essential for the debate that is XRP vs BTC. Ripple has more chances of becoming the medium of exchange for small in-person online transactions. Bitcoin is more of a long term investment used only to buy and itself owing to its high value.
Predictions
We will be able to give a bullish prediction for Bitcoin only if it will break out of the shell that has $40,751 as its base. If and when this happens, the doors will open towards anything between $43,000 to $47,500. This is of course if the coin passes the barriers below $35,297 and the latest high last week which was at $37,455.
As the case is still dragging on, a conclusion as to when XRP will start seeing a positive scale in its price change cannot be said with confidence. As of now, few experts predict that the XRP will see a huge price surge after the end of this huge lawsuit if it ends in favour of it. XRP is the only coin among the top 10 that is yet to see a peak as such.
Ripple is now majorly in a bearish story. It has been stuck between the range of $0.740-$0.760 which seems to have a huge resistance. It has been seeing these lows since the 22nd of June this year and it needs a daily close of $0.760 and above to beat out this trend.
