Forecast: Ripple (XRP) Price could Advance to $1 if this happens

Ripple (XRP) started the week with a bang recording a 50% rebound from $0.50 on Monday, March 11, to a weekly top of $0.75.

While no fresh team updates or lawsuit progress primarily drove the rally, on-chain data suggests growing strategic  investors seeking undervalued altcoins may have formed a bullish catalyst for XRP. 

Will XRP hold steady above $0.69 and advance to new historic peaks in the week ahead like most assets in the top 10 crypto market rankings. 

Bullish speculative traders behind the recent price surge? 

Bar the network update announced by Ripple CTO last week, there was no obvious external catalyst behind the latest surge in XRP price recorded on March 11.

However, a look at the actions of derivatives traders whose activities are known to influence the spot market shows that there have been an uptick in bullish bets since March 10.

Market data pulled from markets-tracking platform Coinglass shows major spikes in XRP leveraged  bullish trades. The Volume-weighted funding rate chart depicts fees paid between derivatives traders to keep their contract positions open.

As seen above, XRP funding rate rose from nearly 500% from last week’s lows. It went from 0.02% on March 6 to 0.09%  on March 12.

When funding rates surges into relatively high positive values it signals that bullish traders are paying higher fees to short traders, in hops of booking higher profits as spot price move upwards. 

When the majority of speculative traders begin trading bullish, a number of them could attempt to stimulate the spot markets by making significant purchases. This may have played a vital role in the latest wave of XRP price rally recorded this week. 

Furthermore, the price rally could signify that investor’s interest might have shifted to underperforming tokens.

XRP price has decoupled from the broad market trends in recent months. Since mid-February XRP has consolidated within the $0.60 – $0.70 narrow range while other rival Layer-1 altcoins have staged double and triple digit month on month gains since the turn of the year. 

Forecast: Will XRP price advance to $1?  

Data from price tracking platform Tradingview  shows that XRP trades at $0.69 at press time, representing a 11% increase in the last 24 hours. Although the recent price surge has grabbed investors attention, XRP remains up only 17% year-to-date, significantly lagging behind Bitcoin’s 72% gains for 2024. 

In terms of potential short-term price action, the upper bollinger band indicates that XRP price currently faces major resistance around $0.75.

If the strategic traders consider XRP undervalued and continue piling on demand, XRP price could hold firm above $0.70 and advance to new peaks around $1 in the days ahead.