XRP has completely recouped its losses resulting from the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple Labs late last year.
XRP (+16.44%), the cryptocurrency used in Ripple Labs’ payments network, is rallying on the coattails of altcoin leader ether (ETH, +0.11%)‘s recent move to record highs.
XRP rose to $0.72 early Monday to hit the highest level since Feb. 2 and was last seen changing hands near $0.70. The third-largest cryptocurrency by market value has gained 18% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk 20 data.
The price rise comes three days after the Ethereum blockchain’s ether token set new lifetime highs near $2,100. Since then, the second-largest coin has established a foothold above $2,000, helping XRP and few other alternative cryptocurrencies such as tron (TRX, +16.9%), stellar (XLM, +10.54%), orchid (OXT, +27.82%), bitcoin cash (BCH, +9.07%), and eos (+5.23%) score gains amid the dull action in bitcoin (BTC, +0.16%) – the crypto market leader.
“We’re not seeing anything specific to XRP and the move feels more like an altcoin season type move given outperformance in other tokens as well,” Joel Kruger, currency strategist at LMAX Digital, told CoinDesk. Names like TRON and siacoin (SC, +24.09%) “are performing even better than XRP on this more thinly traded Easter holiday Monday.”
With a move to two-month highs, XRP has now completely reversed losses suffered in December after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a case against Ripple for raising $1.3 billion by selling XRP in unregistered securities offerings.
Ripple executives’ attorney James K Filan tweeted on Saturday that Ripple and the SEC have reached an agreement to keep the payment company’s two of the four private email correspondences from being scrutinized under the ongoing lawsuit. So far, analysts are not sure if that’s powering XRP higher.