XRP crashed hard from its two-month high reached early Monday, with a planned community purchasing effort failing to deliver the desired results.
The cryptocurrency is trading at $ 0.42 – 40% lower than the $ 0.75 all-time high reached around 11:10 UTC at the time of writing, according to CoinDesk 20 data.
A coordinated purchase effort by some 200,000 members of the two-day old Telegram group dubbed “Buy & Hold XRP” at 8:30 am EST was supposed to push the cryptocurrency towards higher resistance levels. Instead, XRP pulled back from $ 0.75 to $ 0.60, before mass purchases and extended losses to $ 0.40 after 8:30 am EST.
The cryptocurrency nearly doubled in value over the weekend, clocking two months high earlier in the day. The price action suggests that some traders bought XRP in anticipation of a price pump and accidentally pushed it higher. Some of them may be stuck on the wrong side of the market right now.
At the time of the press, the exact reason for the price dump is not known. It is quite possible that a whale (large investor) took advantage of the price hike and dumped his belongings. Pump and dump strategies are not new to crypto markets, especially XRP.
A Reddit post, talking about an 8:30 am crowd-buy attack and how it could be successful, has now been removed by Ripple moderators. However, the Telegram group is still active, with members blaming the stock market outage for the price drop.