The crash was disastrous for those who attempted to invest in XRP at a pre-determined time.
XRP fell by a stomach-churning 45% in the space of three hours on Monday — with an ill-fated pumping scheme burning new crypto investors.
The embattled altcoin had made steady gains over the course of the past seven days, rising from about $0.27 to highs of $0.74 early on Monday.
On Twitter and in certain Telegram, Discord and Reddit groups, messages had been encouraging people to buy XRP at 8.30am EST — with some making confident predictions that the No. 4 cryptocurrency was on the brink of breaking $1.
Although the price briefly leapt up from $0.57 to $0.62 as the clock struck 8.30am, they rapidly slumped to $0.49 by 8.33am… plunging to depths of $0.40 by 8.44am.
At the time of writing, those who bought in at this time will be nursing a 30% fall in the value of their ill-fated investment. Although it’s difficult to know how many people were affected, there were 200,000 members in a Telegram group called “Buy & Hold XRP.”
Some of those promoting the pump have blamed the crash on exchange outages, but tweets from the @Whale_Alert account appeared to show chunky sell-offs in the hour beforehand.
A Reddit post entitled “Why the pump WILL work on Monday” has now been taken down by moderators of the r/Ripple page — with some commenters lamenting they have lost money.
All of this helps illustrate the danger associated with getting investment advice from social media — with Reddit groups such as r/WallStreetBets popularized as a result of the GameStop short squeeze.
As reported by CoinMarketCap, Dogecoin has been on a wild ride of late, in a surge that’s been linked to the GME drama. It’s risen by 358% over the past seven days.
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