- XRP’s price hasn’t crossed $2.30 in the last month.
- The Ripple-designed cryptocurrency is down 35% this year.
- Both Coinbase and the CME Group announced XRP futures products this week.
Bullish bets on XRP have exploded in the last week, with over twice as many traders piling into long positions as shorts.
That’s according to Coinglass data, which shows the surge in so-called perpetual futures, or perps, are futures contracts without expiry dates.
The signs of optimism contrast with data tracking perp trades in other coins. Ethereum and Solana data signal a fairly equal appetite among traders for longs and shorts. For Bitcoin, the ratio between bullish and bearish bets skews heavily to the shorts side.
The massive stacking of long positions on XRP perps comes amid the announcement of two XRP futures products this week, from Coinbase and the CME Group. Coinbase’s offering is live, while the CME’s cash-settled XRP futures product begins trading on May 19.
Those launches have fuelled a fresh wave of optimism for XRP traders who are betting that a rally is imminent.
XRP traded at $2.20 on Friday and is up 5% this week.
But zooming out, XRP has been stubbornly hovering below the $2.30 price mark for over a month, even as other cryptocurrencies have surged.
While Bitcoin is only 10% shy of its price peak, XRP is still down 35% from its 2024 high of $3.38 achieved in January.
Data from crypto derivatives exchange Deribit shows the majority of open positions on short-dated XRP options contracts are betting the price won’t exceed $2.20.
Implied volatility data, which measures where traders expect prices to go, shows that traders are bracing for downward price movement for XRP in the short term.
Still, XRP activity has increased in the last week and reached almost 12 million transactions on Wednesday, the highest for the year. But without a significant uptick in buying activity, analysts have warned that XRP’s price may decline further.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
