It was less than a week ago when we last wrote a major Ripple (XRP) update, and the landscape was entirely different. Not that the company behind the token hadn’t made some major moves, because it frequently does, but because the underlying asset was stuck at $1.00 and analysts were wondering whether that support would hold or we were in for another major leg down.

The environment is entirely different now, and we will take a look at what has taken place in the Ripple ecosystem over the past week, especially on the XRP price front.

FedNow, Gemini, XRPL

Multiple reports emerged online in the past few days that FedNow Payments has enabled payments through Ripple’s tokens after the company’s integration with Volante. FedNow is an instant payments rail in fiat USD that settles on central bank reserves, while Volante provides platform connectivity to the former for domestic payments in the US and to Ripple for cross-border services.

Separately, Gemini’s co-founder, Tyler Winklevoss, announced some “big news for the Ripple Army in Asia.” In a tweet from today, he said users of the cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded with his twin brother in Singapore can deposit and withdraw XRP through the native XRP Ledger network.

Speaking of XRPL, Ali Martinez cited data from Santiment and highlighted a major surge in activity. The number of active addresses skyrocketed by over 650% in the past several days, going from 47,180 to just over 356,000. The popular analyst concluded that such a major spike “typically signals a sharp increase in network participation and is often accompanied by higher price volatility.”

XRP ETFs Are Back, CEO Speaks Out

The major market shift is evident in institutional appetite as well. The spot XRP ETFs, which struggled for weeks with insignificant inflows, picked up the pace last week, especially after Wednesday. In total, they attracted almost $40 million in net inflows, which became the best weekly performance since May.

Moreover, the total cumulative flows hit a new all-time high of just over $1.55 billion, while Bitwise’s XRP fund extended its lead as the largest of the bunch.

Meanwhile, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse spoke on Saturday for the first time after attending two major Washington meetings last week – the Crypto Summit at the White House hosted by the POTUS and CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee. He noted that the conclusion from both meetings is that all parties involved, including TradFi, want clear regulation on the crypto industry, which is likely to come from the highly anticipated CLARITY Act.

XRP Price Revival

As promised above, we will dedicate a major part of this update to the native token’s recent performance. Recall that it was less than seven days ago when the asset struggled to remain above the psychological $1.00 support and dipped below it on a few occasions as the overall sentiment had quickly deteriorated.

However, then came the Wednesday afternoon resurrection of the crypto market, led initially by BTC. Although XRP was a little late to the party, it eventually joined in full force. It skyrocketed from $1.00 to $1.70 by Saturday morning, posting a massive 70% surge in less than 72 hours.

Most of the ‘blame’ was put on whales, as on-chain data showed that they had accumulated roughly 400 million tokens in several days. However, XRP was quickly halted at $1.70 and is now back to around $1.50. Most analysts are now convinced that the asset has to reclaim the $1.65-$1.70 resistance before we can call it a bull phase again.

Popular trader CasiTrades doubled down earlier today on the importance of that level, indicating that it was “incredible to see XRP rally all the way back up to test the macro .618 resistance,” but admitted that it was met with “heavy resistance and instant rejection.”

“So now XRP needs to prove it can actually sustain this rally. We need [the] price to break above the macro 0.618 and then come back to successfully test that level as support. THAT is the structural shift that would signal beginning a new trend.”

Source: CryptoPotato