On Monday morning, Ripple abruptly crashed as much as 30% a day after South Korea’s Financial Services Commission and Financial Supervisory Service announced a joint inspection into accounts offered to cryptocurrency exchanges at Woori Bank, Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea, Korea Development Bank, and NH Bank.
Initially, the dip-buyers came running to rescue what was, until recently, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, but over the past 24 hours, the situation has steadily deteriorated.
There’s all manner of skepticism about the viability of Ripple’s (the company) game plan (more here) and on Tuesday, Bloomberg was out underscoring some of the concerns.
“A charitable explanation might be that, as regulators face added pressure to respond to the global crypto-frenzy, the world has suddenly woken up to the potential of teachers’ pets like Ripple over anti-bank rebels like Bitcoin,” Gadfly’s Lionel Laurent wrote early Tuesday morning, before adding that “bank-friendly blockchains look more like hopeful experiments than products ready for real adoption [and] a less charitable view would suggest this looks more like another moment of speculative madness in a market that’s dominated by individual investors, not institutions.”
Right. Throw in the fact that the “rumor” about Ripple being added to Coinbase has been squashed (for the time being anyway) and it’s easy to see why some folks might be taking profits.
“The ripple ecosystem is definitely going to have to get a lot bigger to justify where XRP is right now,” Canaccord’s Michael Graham wrote last week, before offering a more constructive take than that espoused by the uber-skeptics: “The use case for XRP is quite clear. That sets it apart from other crypto assets.”
Whatever, Michael.
Notably (I guess), Bill Miller weighed in on Tuesday, and his take is worth a listen considering he’s made a lot more money than you have on cryptocurrencies:
We bring all of this up because on Tuesday evening, Ripple slid back to its Monday flash crash lows:
As you can see, it’s trying to rebound and maybe it will (hell, there’s no telling with these things), but we’d be remiss not to at least remind you that Ripple is still up 30,000% over the last twelve months, so it’s not exactly like these are “oversold” levels (assuming that term even means anything in this context).
Oh, and there actually is some Ripple news on Tuesday evening. According to Business Times (citing Brad Garlinghouse), Ripple was among the companies that held early talks with the Monetary Authority of Singapore for its technology to be part of the regulator’s blockchain experiment in cross-border payments.
We’ll leave you with CNBC explaining how to buy Ripple (because that’s a great thing to be telling retail investors)…
Lol @CNBC is showing people how to use the internet to buy Ripple. Literally click-by-click tutorial followed by “that’s how easy it is!”
This is so insane. pic.twitter.com/8uzt0YP5Po
— Pomp ? (@APompliano) January 7, 2018
Now you know how to buy the dip shown in the chart above.
