Ripple’s (XRP) Bearish Turn in January, but Why?

The beginning of January had Ripple (XRP) hitting all-time-highs and put it at the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Now, it seems the coin has taken a strong bearish turn.

Currently, XRP is selling under the $1 mark, at $0.96 a coin. It is currently down -14.38% in 24 hours but remains the third top cryptocurrency. Earlier we reported that India’s finance minister gave a statement about the country’s stance on cryptocurrency. Many reports stated that the government had flat-out banned cryptocurrency from being used as a currency. It was blown wildly out of proportion by the media and instead, India will initiate a crackdown on crypto assets being used for “illegitimate activities.”

Ripple’s core project has not altered but it’s decline this month has primarily to do with various circumstances in the cryptocurrency space. As you can see from the chart above, there have been two very dramatic drops in the digital currency.

Ripple & Stellar News

Back on January 9th the major cryptocurrency index, CoinMarketCap, removed a group of South Korean exchanges from its index without any prior warning. It sparked cryptocurrency panic selloff, as most freaked out seeing all of the digital assets dropping so quickly. It wasn’t until almost 12 hours later that buyers became aware but Ripple didn’t necessarily rebound from the news. A week later, the digital asset took another hit when the BitConnect exchange abruptly shut down. The coin rebounded mostly from its losses with the circumstance but has yet to break over the $2 mark in weeks.

Ripple’s core project has many major banks currently testing its distributed ledger technology, to improve their global payment systems. Currently, it has the major Canadian bank CIBC (NYSE:CM), Banco Santander (NYSE:SAN) from Spain, Swiss UBS (NYSE:UBS) and Italy’s Unicredit (NASDAQ:UNCFF) working with its technology. Back in November, American Express (NYSE:AXP) partnered with Ripple to send B2B payments between the U.S and the U.K.

XRP’s value should continue to rise back up this year, despite the latest series of unfortunate events. The global payment system it provides banks saves them both time and money and we all know money saving is their primary concern. Don’t count out XRP just yet.