XRP is Winning Social

Wanted to say thanks to everyone who participated in the poll we did over the weekend. It seems the results are pretty clear.

This is actually well in line with what I was expecting. I've been saying for several weeks now that XRP is winning at social media. Within moments of posting the poll, a slew of responses came in from XRP supporters urging the community to vote using the hashtags #XRPtheStandard and #XRPcommunity.

By the time the poll had reached 6,000 votes, it was actually showing 70% in favor of XRP, a peak that was steadily clawed back until the poll closed.

The comments featured a strong showing of all the top crypto projects, especially Cardano, EOS, Litecoin, Dash and a bunch of other projects, some of which I'd never heard of. What I found most interesting were the communities that chose not to participate.

There were literally zero reposts from the Ethereum community even though they do have a large dev community on Twitter and very little excitement from Bitcoin enthusiasts who can be quite vocal when they want. In fact, the opposite, several responses indicated that they weren't even willing to participate in a poll that considers XRP as a cryptocurrency.

As with any poll, it seems the results reflect the medium, and Twitter polls probably shouldn't be taken as gospel. However, it's nice to see such an active community surrounding Ripple. Let's wait for the decisions of the SEC and hope that eventually, the large financial institutions may consider adopting it as a payment method.

Traditional Markets

Welcome to Cyber Monday. The much more humane version of Black Friday where participants, rather than getting trampled in stores, are free to get frustrated in the comfort of their own homes.

Markets are green today across the board with high-risk assets performing the best. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is leading the stock markets higher and even crypto is seeing a nice bounce off the weekend lows.

The currency markets are also giving a clear risk-on signal today...

Also, watch out for statements today from both Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, and, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England.

Gold Confusion

The only asset bucking the theme here is gold again, which despite the rest of the markets shying away from safe havens, is rising as if it's a risk-asset. This isn't new though. Gold has been showing clear signs of risk confusion over the course of the last year.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much we can really read into gold's movements at the moment. As we can see it's been in a very tight consolidation range of just $10 an ounce for the last week.

No doubt many automated orders, stop losses and take profits, are building up on either side which could precipitate a breakout at some point.

Crypto Mom

One factor that's been influencing crypto pricing lately is the outlook from global financial regulators. So, it's quite important for investors to understand what they're thinking.

For this purpose, I highly recommend this recent podcast, where my tweep, Peter McCormack, interviewed SEC commissioner Hester Pierce, who apparently also goes by the nickname Crypto Mom.

XRP Chart

Given the apparent win of the XRP community in the poll above, and given the title of today's update, I feel it's in order to give a quick technical analysis on this unique asset.

Bitcoin had an amazing 2017 but in percentage terms, the gains were dwarfed by XRP, which rose by a total of 33,493% during the course of the year. The only way we can get a good look at something like this is by using a logarithmic chart, which highlights percentage movements rather than static price.

Also unlike bitcoin, the price floor on XRP has a bit of a cushion, which was provided by the run-up to the X-rapid release in late September. Thus the red line at $0.25 can be seen as strong support. The yellow line at $0.35 also played a significant role during August and September and so can be seen as a light level of support.