Every day, crypto investors and enthusiasts worldwide execute currency trades totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in value. All these trades occur across numerous platforms, which maintain prices in sync through little more than arbitrage. That’s the strategy of purchasing an asset for a discounted price on one platform and selling it on another for a profit. When that happens often enough, prices balance out naturally in response. Professional traders deploy sophisticated bots that execute such trades millions of times per second.
Needless to say, then, it’s a big deal when one or more crypto exchanges report anomalous price spikes that suddenly boost one or more currencies. It’s something that happens from time to time, usually due to some inadvertent action by a platform’s maintainers. Other times, it results from issues with the involved cryptocurrencies themselves.
Interestingly, however, such currency issues tend to afflict newer and less-traded coins with one big exception. That exception is Ripple (XRP). It’s a major coin with a top-five market cap, and yet it suffers price glitches with alarming regularity. Here’s the lowdown on some of the most notable XRP glitches and whether it’s possible to turn them to your advantage.
A Brief History of XRP Glitches
The earliest known example of an XRP glitch happened on January 4, 2019. It was an error that affected the one-minute chart on the well-known crypto exchange Coinbase. Suddenly, that chart displayed an XRP price of $7,308 — a figure wildly disconnected from the XRP true value investors were expecting. For reference, XRP closed that day at $0.3567. There was never any clear explanation for the anomaly, and the problem resolved itself within minutes. A similar unexplained event happened on TradingView, where XRP’s price jumped to $9,864 from around $0.22 within moments. It, too, was resolved within minutes with no official explanation.
One of the more jaw-dropping XRP glitches happened in December of 2021 when both CoinMarketCap and Coinbase briefly listed XRP’s price at a way-too-good-to-be-true $161 million. Both platforms, to their credit, identified the problem within minutes, tracing it to a faulty data feed. In that case, the glitch had affected multiple currencies on the two platforms but was swiftly corrected.
It’s essential to note that not every XRP glitch resulted in the currency’s value rising. At least one incident affecting the Bitrue derivatives platform in April 2023 saw XRP’s value plummet to $0.0001. In that case, the damage was more than cosmetic, as the erroneous data triggered stop-loss liquidations that cost traders substantial sums.
That brings us to the million-dollar question: is there a pattern to XRP’s glitches, and do they represent an opportunity for profit? Unfortunately, contrary to the musings of various crypto influencers, the answer is no. Overall, XRP’s glitches have never presented profit opportunities. They do, however, come with the risk of significant losses, as the Bitrue example illustrates. The reason is simple. When XRP’s price erroneously goes up on any given exchange, you won’t likely find anyone naive enough to buy any at that price. However, if it drops, it can trigger automated sales and purchases that will always benefit the buyers at the sellers’ expense. It is for that reason that it’s wise to try and insulate yourself from losses caused by XRP anomalies.
Avoiding Unnecessary XRP Losses
Unfortunately, there are only two certain ways to avoid losses connected to an XRP glitch. One option is to divest yourself from XRP. Although any coin can experience an unexpected price glitch, XRP appears to be particularly susceptible to them at an alarmingly high rate. Since there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop, selling your stake is a sure way to avoid the problem. If you don’t want to do that, you will need to do the following instead:
Don’t Store XRP in Your Trading Accounts
Your first step in insulating yourself against XRP glitch losses is to hold your stake in a reputable XRP wallet. If they’re not immediately accessible in your main trading accounts, it can make it harder for a glitch to threaten your holdings. You can even keep your XRP in a cold-storage wallet as an added barrier to any accidental overreactions to anomalous price data.
Avoid Auto-Executing Trades
The second thing to do is to avoid setting up stop-loss orders involving your XRP holdings. If you want to keep trading in XRP, it’s infeasible to keep all your holdings in crypto wallet. So, you shouldn’t take chances with any you leave in your trading accounts.
Make a Habit of Checking for XRP News
Without automated protection against losses, you should make a habit of keeping up with news about XRP. That way, you’ll know when to expect significant price changes so you can take appropriate action. While it won’t save you from a flash crash, this should still give you ample time to capitalize on real price movements. CoinMarketCap offers an excellent XRP page, which includes an XRP news live section. That way, you can correlate news items and their resulting price impacts in the same place.
Get To Know XRP’s Trends
Finally, one of the surest ways to avoid getting sucked into an XRP glitch is to familiarize yourself with the coin’s broader trends. As one of the older coins on the market, there’s ample historical data on its price movements over time. Better still, XRP has traded in a somewhat narrow price band throughout its existence. That means it isn’t challenging to get an intuitive feel for its expected price behavior.
There’s No Get-Rich-Quick Glitch
Unfortunately, XRP price glitches are little more than confusing accidents suffered by loosely-governed crypto exchanges. They’re a somewhat unavoidable consequence of crypto’s decentralized trading infrastructure. However, since they can do real harm to your bottom line, it’s worth taking preemptive action. Then, you can sit back and Google “XRP glitch today” to chuckle at whatever the next inexplicable jump in the venerable cryptocurrency’s alleged value is. And you can do it without fear that you’re losing your shirt in the process.
