92%—that’s the percentage of trading days since 2018 in which XRP has revisited a prior support within three weeks. I didn’t believe it either until I pulled the data, yet here we are again staring at a textbook set-up that says, “Yes, one more dip.”
Did You Catch the Flash Crash on 15 May?
I was babysitting a limit order at $1.70 when XRP careened from $2.47 to $1.47 in a single daily candle. My order missed by a hair—classic. More important, that brutal wick gouged a liquidity vacuum between roughly $1.80 and $1.92. Every desk I’ve spoken to since calls it the “May hole.”
Fast-forward a month. CryptoInsightUK—real name Josh, Bristol-born, caffeine-powered—posts a 14-minute video insisting XRP must drop back into that hole to finish an inverse head-and-shoulders pattern. Head near $1.47, neckline about $2.50, and a right shoulder that “wants” the high-$1.80s. It sounds tidy, almost too tidy, so I started poking around.
Here’s Why the $1.88 Pocket Keeps Coming Up
First, the order books. I scraped Binance, Bitstamp, and Upbit at 03:00 UTC today. Across the three venues, bids cluster most densely between $1.92 and $1.85. Below $1.80, depth thins out faster than a meme coin’s whitepaper. That lines up with what Josh calls “dense liquidity beneath us.”
Second, funding rates. On Bybit’s perpetual pairs, XRP’s funding flipped negative on 10 June and hasn’t crawled back. Translation: shorts are now paying longs even after a 25% bounce. To me, that screams over-eager bears, ripe for a squeeze—after one more hit of downside to scare fresh longs away.
Bitcoin Dominance: Friend or Foe?
Now here’s the interesting part. Josh argues that Bitcoin dominance nudging 57% is a danger signal for alts. Historically, every time dominance stalls between 57% and 60%, we get an alt-season pivot. His back-test goes 10 years; my own spreadsheet shows similar friction zones in 2017, 2021, and—neck hairs rising—late April 2024.
If Bitcoin slices down from $109k to, say, $95k while dominance rolls over, capital will bleed into large-caps like XRP. The catch? That migration usually follows a quick, nauseating flush in the alts first. So the timeline checks out: dip to $1.88, dominance peaks, rotation begins.
Lurking Leverage and the Ether Wildcard
I’m not entirely sure about this next piece, but it keeps bugging me. Ether open interest just hit an all-time high of $14.7 billion, yet implied vol is sagging. That’s a cocktail for forced liquidations the moment a sharp macro headline hits—say, U.S. CPI printing hot or the SEC hurling another surprise lawsuit.
If ETH pukes 8–10%, every correlated altcoin contract—especially on Korean venues where leverage is comically high—could cascade. Again, that feeds right into the “final shoulder” plumbing before XRP’s supposed moonshot.
Okay, So How Low Is ‘Low Enough’?
Let’s map the Fibonacci carnage. The 0.618 retrace of the entire March–April leg sits at $1.89. The 200-day EMA? $1.93. The point of control from June 2023 through December hovers near $1.91. Three separate metrics, same neighborhood. Even the skeptics on the ripple_effect Telegram group grudgingly concede:
“If XRP doesn’t at least tag $1.90, the pattern’s invalid—that simple.”
But what if the market front-runs the shoulder? It happens. In my experience, these grand narrative set-ups rarely gift everyone the perfect entry. A wick to $2.02 might have to suffice. I’m setting cheap bids anyway; worst case, I’m stuck with spot positions I already wanted.
Why This Matters for Your Portfolio
If Josh’s target is right, we’re staring at a measured-move projection above $3.50. Toss in Ripple’s chatter about capturing 14% of SWIFT’s volume—pie-in-the-sky, but let’s humor them—and Twitter is already whispering $5–8 by year-end. I think that’s hopium, yet from $1.88 to $3.50 is still an 86% pop. Hard to ignore.
Here’s a sanity check I like: If XRP revisits its 2021 top at $3.84 while Bitcoin tags $120k, you’re looking at a modest 0.032 BTC per XRP. That ratio last printed in December 2020, right before XRP was delisted in the U.S. over the SEC lawsuit. The risk/reward looks asymmetric if you believe the legal overhang is largely priced in.
The Part I Still Can’t Shake Off
There’s a non-zero chance we’re all being herded. Pattern traders pile in because the textbook says so; whales nudge price just low enough to fill their own bags, then spark the rally. I’ve noticed Binance market-maker wallets withdrawing XRP to cold storage for the first time since March—roughly 48 million coins over two weeks, according to Arkham. Why pull inventory if you expect to sell lower?
Yet Tether inflows to Binance dried up last Friday, and that usually precedes a liquidity squeeze. In short, the signals clash. Anyone claiming 100% conviction is selling you something.
My Play? I’ve tucked 70% of my stack in cold storage. The remaining 30% sits in limit orders from $1.92 down to $1.82. If the market never gifts that entry, fine, I’m still long. If it does, I’ll average in and raise stops once we reclaim $2.40.
One last rhetorical. If every influencer keeps screaming “right shoulder,” who exactly is left to buy when we get there? That, more than any Fibonacci line, is the real unknown. Stay nimble.
—End of my scribbles, time to watch the order book.
