Bitcoin Pullback Continues – Ripple Celebrates Anniversary With Price Explosion

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The pullback continues in legacy bitcoin prices. Today, single-coin pricing was in the upper $15,000 range, down from a high of $20,000 just a few days ago. The not-unexpected deflation is the biggest plunge for bitcoin to date, but is still relatively within its normal rise and fall parameters.

Bitcoin Cash also took a hit, down more than 20 percent to the $3,100 range in what’s clearly a profit-taking mode after its recent price run-up. Most other cryptocurrencies also took a hit on the day, as market momentum in the pre-holiday period generally leaned toward the bears.

The big outlier on the day was Ripple. The fourth-largest cryptocurrency breached the $1.00 per XRP level for the first time, rising more than 40 percent in the last 24-hours. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ripple celebrates its fifth anniversary today for the XRP Ledger. Ripple announced that XRP is now listed on 50 exchanges worldwide.

Also, today at 12:45 pm PST, Chief Cryptographer David Schwartz (aka Joel Katz) will be doing a live Q&A on Ripple XRP and what’s to come in 2018. He will post the link to tune in shortly before it kicks off on his twitter.

Bitcoin market highlights for the 24 hours ending December 21, 2017 at 1:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time

The highest price seen was $17,384.50 on the Bittrex exchange at 2:18 am today. Bittrex saw $170,170,000 of bitcoin change hands.

The lowest price seen was $14,294.30 on Binance’s exchange at 10:54 am today. Binance’s 24 hour volume was $241,278,000.

The average price on the surveyed exchanges, as weighed by volume, was $16,530.39.

Volatility was a bit above average, with the BlockTribune Volatility Index coming in at 53.7. A higher number indicates greater price volatility with 50 describing an average day.

These statistics were consolidated from 11 different exchanges. It includes only BTC/USD trades and only on those exchanges that had at least 1% of the total volume of BTC/USD trades during the measurement period.