The year-long bear market of 2019 got the best of us. Throughout the year the entire cryptocurrency market was in the red. By the end of December 2019, the bulls caught up and the market started recovering. Bitcoin turned out to be the best performer of the year while the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency, XRP, was one of the worst-performing altcoins.

Now as Bitcoin continues to push past the $10,000 mark, XRP seems to be pulling out of its 680-day bear trend as it touched $0.33, a seven month high.

Throughout 2019, XRP was down close to 90% from the all-time high of prices well over $3.50 to as low as 17 cents per coin in December 2019. Many community members accused Ripple, the company behind the popular altcoin, for deliberately trying to crash the price of the token.

The issue escalated to such an extent that in August, a Change.org petition dubbed “Stop Ripple Dumping” was started by a crypto twitter personality and an XRP advocate going by the name of Crypto BitLord. This followed a threat from the XRP community to fork XRP if Ripple did not address the situation.

However, multiple crypto analysts now believe that as the 680-day bear trend has broken, XRP is looking towards a massive upward rally. Since the $0.17 bottom established in December 2019, the price of the third-largest cryptocurrency has rallied by 75% to $0.30, surpassing Bitcoin’s relatively mild 60% move higher.

Analysts bullish about the future

According to Josh Olszewicz, an analyst at cryptocurrency data provider Brave New Coin, the breakout from the bearish trend was accompanied by a breach of the 200-day exponential moving average. Alongside this, XRP is also above the cloud or “Kumo” on the Ichimoku indicator – an indicator designed to provide a full “at-a-glance” look at an asset’s health. XRP could soon be looking at new highs in the coming months.

$XRP 680-day bear trend over



– above 200-day EMA

– above bear PF

– above Cloud pic.twitter.com/C47ndnVcCP — Josh Olszewicz (@CarpeNoctom) February 14, 2020

Another crypto analyst going by the name Crypto Rand believes that if XRP breaks the current price range, the price of the token will “moonshot.” Rand tweeted:

According to Rand, this specific price has constrained bulls on multiple occasions, acting as key resistance on multiple occasions. Like Olszewicz, he claims that a decisive break into the low-$0.30s will cause an even greater breakout.

Despite all the bullish predictions, XRP continues to face hurdles on its way. Recently, the price of XRP dropped from 0.33 USD to 0.13 USD within a few seconds on BitMex, one of the largest crypto-margin trading platforms in the world.

Many traders claimed that their stop losses were not triggered and their positions were immediately liquidated. Overall, XRP/USD dropped 60% for two seconds. Responding to the backlash from the XRP community, CEO Arthur Hayes thrashed XRP in a tweet calling the altcoin ‘a turd.’ Hayes said:

“CRipple the shorts. Pro Tip: the Buy and Sell buttons are both equally profitable regardless of whether or not you are trading a turd.”

Adding to this, BitMEX recently launch an XRP-USD Quanto swap in an attempt to capture the booming crypto derivatives market. However, how this new XRP/USD product affects the pricing of the token is yet to be seen. As of press time, XRP is sitting at $0.32 with a market cap of $14 billion.