Spark airdrop has finally arrived, so what’s next for XRP’s price?
The free token giveaway or “airdrop” of Flare Network, a blockchain project that Ripple Labs Inc. has vested interested in, kicked off on Saturday. Holders of Ripple’s native token XRP will receive an equivalent amount of Flare’s Spark token shortly after.
This was a highly anticipated event for the third-largest crypto by market cap. And many speculate that this triggered its massive rally last month, which catapulted XRP’S price from $0.2395 to a high of $0.78 — a 232% spike!
Flare will be dropping 45 billion tokens across different crypto exchanges and is all a part of Ripple’s move to increase the XRP ledger’s utility. Flare Network is actually a utility fork for XRP and is geared towards executing smart contracts.
Approximately an hour before the Spark snapshot, there was a noticeable uptick in volume, which ultimately led to a considerable spike in volatility at precisely midnight. The entire 30 minutes after midnight also captured a nearly 10% drop for XRP before reversing it to a 1.27% gain.
Still, XRP ended up falling to as low as $0.4865 for most of Saturday. Investors deem that XRP holders used the opportunity to unload or take profits off their holdings since the snapshot has already concluded.
Now, the question on everyone’s mind is, “what’s next for the price of XRP?” While Ripple was meant to land more banks and financial institutions to its network and increase the usage of XRP, it has struggled to do so, and this can be attributed to why its price remained subdued for over a year.
But by bringing in smart contract functionality, Ripple ups its game and challenges Ethereum in the process. However, the technical picture looks bleak for XRP in the short-term, breaking the support level that coincides with the 50% Fibonacci retracement.
Further selling pressure could target the 61.8% level, and there is bearish momentum to support it, as indicated by the MACD. Should the price reach that Fib level, XRP could come down to $0.4381.