No Swell: Ripple Price Sinks as Conference Passes Without Bullish News for XRP
The ripple price plunged as Ripple’s much-anticipated fintech conference came and went without the major announcement that XRP investors were hoping for.
Two months ago, the ripple price spiked after Ripple previewed a major announcement. It quickly became clear that the announcement was conference-related, but investors let their imaginations run wild as the firm slowly revealed details over the ensuing days, and speculators began driving up demand for XRP — the native currency of the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL).
Specifically, they believed that the conference would be hosted in Asia and would be accompanied by an announcement of a partnership with an Asian bank, corporate giant, or even government. When neither of these materialized, the ripple price plunged.
A similar phenomenon occurred this week.
From October 16-18, Ripple hosted “Swell: The Future Is Here” in Toronto. Once again, investors anticipated that bullish news for XRP would break at the conference, and the ripple price rose as high as $0.291 on Monday.
ripple price
XRP Price Chart from CoinMarketCap
Investors watched the conference live stream with bated breath, but, once again, they saw no significant XRP-related news. And while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did announce that Ripple was one of several fintech companies that had collaborated to develop Mojaloop, an open-source application intended to help the world’s unbanked population access basic financial services, the announcement did not have any direct bearing on XRP.
Consequently, the ripple price quickly reversed course and ultimately sank as low as $0.208 on Thursday. This reduced its market cap to just $8.1 billion — a nearly $3 billion decrease since it briefly cracked the $11 billion threshold earlier in the week.
XRP has seen a slight bump to $0.217 in the past few hours following the release of Ripple’s quarterly XRP markets report — which teases the announcement of new partnerships and an “innovative approach” to use XRP to increase Ripple adoption — but the currency is still down about 15% for the week.
I think it's more about the underlying technology with ILP than what Ripple actually has to offer. Even the Gates said that was what attracted them. I think you'll be seeing others start trying to duplicate that more.