XRP has crashed hard from a two-month high reached early Monday, with a planned community buying effort failing to yield desired results.
The cryptocurrency is trading near $0.42 at time of writing – down 40% from the high of $0.75 reached at around 11:10 UTC, according to CoinDesk 20 data.
A coordinated buying effort by some 200,000 members of the two-day-old Telegram group called "Buy & Hold XRP" at 08:30 a.m. ET was supposed to push the cryptocurrency to higher resistance levels. Instead, XRP pulled back from $0.75 to $0.60 ahead of the crowd buying and extended losses to $0.40 after 08:30 a.m. ET.
The cryptocurrency almost doubled in value over the weekend and clocked a two-month high earlier today. The price action suggests some traders bought XRP in anticipation of a price pump, inadvertently pushing it higher. Some of them may now be trapped on the wrong side of the market.
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At press time, the exact reason for the price dump is not known. It's quite possible that a whale (large investor) took advantage of the price rise and dumped his holdings. Pump and dump strategies are not new to crypto markets, particularly for XRP.
A Reddit post, which talked about a crowd-buying attack at 08:30 and how it could be successful, has now been removed by Ripple moderators. The Telegram group, however, is still active, where members are blaming exchange downtimes for the price drop.