The XRP price has held to $2.20 today, with the altcoin struggling to make headway amid ongoing challenges for the cryptocurrency market.
Crypto as a whole is down by 2% in the past 24 hours, with prices depressed by the looming US tariff deadline next week, although markets are becoming more hopeful about rate cuts.
As for XRP, it holds on to a modest 1% gain in a week and a 1.5% increase in the past month, although news has emerged which suggests that these percentages could increase soon.
On the one hand, analysts are giving odds of 95% that XRP ETFs will gain approval, while Ripple itself has just announced the launch of an Ethereum-compatible sidechain, something which could boost usage of XRP Ledger in the longer term.
A couple of days ago, Bloomberg analysts Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart posted ETF approval odds for various cryptocurrencies, including XRP, Litecoin, Solana, Dogecoin and Cardano (among others).
As we can see below, XRP is at the top of this lift (along with LTC and SOL), with a 95% chance of approval.
As of writing, ten XRP ETF applications are awaiting evaluation, including offerings from Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, 21Shares and Canary.
The deadline for many of these applications currently falls in October, meaning that the XRP price could have a big boost come the final quarter of the year.
Yet it has also received another boost this week, with Ripple announcing the launch of the XRPL EVM Sidechain, which will bring Ethereum-comptible apps and smart contracts to XRP Ledger.
While this launch could be hugely beneficial for XRP in the future, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the XRP price today.
Looking at its chart, we see that it’s on the brink of regaining momentum, after a period of overselling.
Its relative strength index (purple) has just crossed 50 after several weeks below this level, while its MACD (orange, blue) looks like it’s ready to turn positive again.
Now may therefore be a good time to buy XRP, with the latest CoinShares data showing that institutions have been accumulating the coin over the past week.
Indeed, XRP is the third-most-purchased coin this week, behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, while we have also seen Ripple locking up huge amounts of the coin in escrow over the past few days.
Assuming that XRP ETFs do gain approval, we could therefore see the XRP price reach $2.50 again in the next few weeks, before ending the year close to $4.
And if institutional adoption accelerates — particularly with Ripple expanding cross-border payment solutions and stablecoin infrastructure — XRP could be on a long-term trajectory toward $1,000, as it captures a larger share of global liquidity flows in the years ahead.
As strong as XRP looks at the moment, it won’t be the only token to enjoy big rallies in the latter stages of the year.
It will also receive competition from a range of newer tokens, including presale coins about to list for the first time.
One of these is TOKEN6900 (T6900), an ERC-20 cryptocurrency that launched its ICO earlier this week.
TOKEN6900 has already raised $100,000 in its sale, with the coin adopting a viral marketing campaign full of memes riffing on the late 90s and early 2000s.
In contrast to meme coins and alts that position themselves as having utility and strong fundamentals, TOKEN6900 is taking the opposite approach, declaring on its website that it’s “not built on fundamentals.”
It’s simply aiming to become the next viral meme token, one which generates enough attention and momentum to rally strongly when it lists later in the year.
As a token, it will have a max supply of 930,993,091 T6900, with its presale having a hard cap of $5 million.
Holders will be able to stake the coin, but other than that the coin is making a boast of having no utility whatsoever.
Investors intrigued by the coin can go to the TOKEN6900 website to participate in the presale, with T6900 currently available at $0.006425.
This will rise again in under two days, so traders wanting to make the biggest possible gains should act quickly.
