Another +18% today, it's now at ~$2.4 billion market cap and over half of Bitcoin if you count the full supply... Really blows my mind..
Wouldn't it be much lower than that if there wasn't a few huge whales that don't sell? (read here the devs that have the majority of XRP "available" on the market).
I mean a little buying pressure and you're through the roof in market cap if less than 10% of the coins are really in circulation (I speculate on the % value in circulation, no hard fact). And the fact is that the pump is continuous, no major correction and its up 500% this fall... I don't see regular crypto market behavior here, as there's always a correction after a steep increase in market cap...
Yes, a simple explanation could be that since the supply is so extremely centralized it could just be a case of one of the big whales withholding supply, but on the other hand there's been huge and sustained volumes for a long time now. As you say it's normal crypto behaviour since we haven't had a correction yet, if this is a pump and dump it's the biggest one the (crypto) world has ever seen..
Actually, it wouldn't be too hard to engineer a P&D. Prices on the front page of coinmarketcap are volume-weighted averages of prices at individual exchanges, if I understand correctly. The volumes, and hence the weights, are based on a time average (24 hrs?) and are relatively stable. But the
prices on individual exchanges (eg, BTC38) are most recent prices and easy to move.
So, it's possible to target the high-volume exchanges like BTC38 and disproportionately increase or support the market cap with small amounts.
Thus, if you wanted to, you could use a relatively small amount of funds to manipulate and support the overall market cap on Coinmarketcap. Then, other retail sheep investors or momentum investors would be drawn in, inadvertently supporting the price (at least for a while).
I'm not saying this is necessarily what's been happening with Ripple XRP, but the price disparity between BTC38 and other exchanges seems consistent with the possibility of an intentional effort to cause a price rise.