On Monday (February 1), according to data from TradingView, on crypto exchange Bitstamp, the XRP price surged above the $0.70 level for the first time since 24 November 2020.
The surge in the price of XRP from $0.2841 at 00:00 UTC on Saturday (January 30) to $0.7471, where it was at 11:05 UTC on Monday (February 1) seems to be mostly due to a Telegram group called “Buy & Hold XRP” (created on Saturday). Shortly thereafter, the size of this group reached 200,000, which is Telegram’s limit on group size This led to the creation of a second Telegram group with the same name.
Although the aim of these groups was to start the pump at 08:30 EST (i.e. 13:30 UTC) on February 1, the XRP price started surging 03:35 UTC on January 30.
Thanks to these Telegram groups, XRP is currently trading at a higher price than on 21 December 2020, the day before SEC announced that it had “filed an action against Ripple Labs Inc. and two of its executives, who are also significant security holders, alleging that they raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.” The highest price that XRP reached on 21 December 2020 was $0.5650.
Jehan Chu, co-founder and managing partner at Hong Kong-based Kenetic Capital said, “Traditional Crypto-Pump groups are being copied and legitimized by WallStreetBets-style crowd-pumps, and are now turning their burning gaze from dogecoin (DOGE, +40.66%) to XRP.”
As for Ripple, Kuwait Finance House (KFH) announced on Sunday that it had successfully launched instant cross-border payments service to KFH-Turkey using Ripple’s technology.
Khaled Yousif Alshamlan, General Manager of Corporate Banking at KFH, had this to say:
“Financial institutions can send payments anywhere instantly, reliably and cost-effectively by joining Ripple’s growing, global network RippleNet.“
On 1 August 2019, KFH announced that it had gone live on RippleNet for money transfer.
