XRP Dumps Despite DeFi Promise and Flare (FLR) Airdrop

Ripple’s native token XRP is tanking today just days after a snapshot was taken of holders and balances with the premise of a big DeFi related airdrop.

XRP is the worst performing crypto asset in the top fifty by market capitalization over the past 24 hours according to Coingecko. Prices have plummeted 7% since this time yesterday while the majority of altcoins are in the green at the moment.

XRP Price Crunch

Currently trading at $0.457, XRP has fallen from its intraday high of $0.493 this time yesterday. Prices for the cross border transfer token have collapsed 42% from their 2020 high of $0.78 on November 24 according to Tradingview.

Over the past seven days, XRP has lost 18% and the fortnight outlook is even worse with a 26% slide. The trend from this year’s pump is clearly down and accelerating.

It took over two years for XRP prices to finally get a lift but it looks like those short-lived gains are rapidly eroding. The asset is still 86% down from its all-time high of over $3.3 during the crypto bubble of 2017/18.

No Spark From Flare Airdrop

There has been very little momentum generated from the promise of an airdrop for XRP holders from DeFi protocol Flare Network which was announced in August. In what has been the most excitement the ‘XRP Army’ has had for a couple of years, Flare promises to bring DeFi to the XRP ecosystem through the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and an Ethereum based token called FLR.

A snapshot of XRP balances on the ledger was taken on December 12 with the view of distributing FLR tokens over the coming couple of years. 45 billion out of a total of 100 billion Spark tokens will be distributed, with 15% claimable at the time of network launch which has been estimated for around 3 to 6 months’ time according to the official blog post and FAQ.

The firm intends to tokenize trustless XRP on the Flare Network as an FXRP token which can then be used in various DeFi applications.

Unfortunately for XRP holders, the pump has already happened and the dump is accelerating.

What’s next for XRP bulls and why XRP prices fell?

According to one of the known cryptocurrency analyst, twitter handle @crediblecrypto the 61.8% retracement in XRP price is totally normal and was expected after a 150+% pump. In his opinion the airdrop has nothing to do with fall in XRP prices and is just a co-incidence that correction and airdrop took place at the same time.

Has nothing to do with the airdrop. Correlation is not causation. We pumped like 150+%, a correction was expected. Thus far has hit the 61.8% retracement- totally normal. The airdrop just occurred during the correction (which started two weeks prior to the airdrop btw).

— Credible Crypto (@CredibleCrypto) December 16, 2020

Major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, OKEx, and Kraken have pledged support for the airdrop and will automate the process for customers holding XRP on the exchange.