TL;DR

• Ripple won a major cross-border payments award and made progress on its RLUSD stablecoin.
• SHIB saw high volatility, briefly surged, but then declined; analysts remain cautiously optimistic.
• Bitcoin dropped in early October, but some see potential for recovery.

What’s New Around Ripple (XRP)?

The company made the headlines lately, securing yet another accolade. As CryptoPotato reported, Juniper Research (an entity that specializes in delivering in-depth market research and strategic insights for the digital technology sector) awarded Ripple the Platinum prize for best cross-border payments platform in 2024. 

Previously, Ripple won the payment prize in the UK – the PAY360 Awards – while Fortune Magazine placed it among the top 50 workplaces for technology in 2023.

RLUSD – the firm’s upcoming stablecoin – has also witnessed some progress. Ripple minted and burned thousands of tokens as part of the private beta testing phase over the last few weeks.

Most recently, the X user Vet claimed the XRP Ledger amendment to allow (clawback) tokens like RLUSD to be employed in the AMM (Automated market makers) “went through the code review.” They argued that the next step involves “some cosmetics and merge into a new rippled release for validators to vote on.”

Despite these developments, XRP keeps underperforming. It plunged by double digits to around $0.51 at the start of October when the SEC appealed a 2023 verdict in the case against Ripple. Currently, the token is worth around $0.52 (per CoinGecko’s data), representing a 9.5% decline on a two-week scale. 

SHIB’s Ups and Downs

At one point yesterday (October 9), the popular meme coin was among the top-performing cryptocurrencies. Its solid (albeit brief) increase coincided with plunging SHIB exchange reserves and an explosion of the burn rate by over 400%. However, bears stepped in, and the asset’s price is well in the red today (October 10).

Despite the enhanced volatility, multiple analysts envision good days ahead. Not long ago, the X user Yoddha claimed the price pattern had formed a specific triangular shape, which could be followed by a 130% rally if broken to the upside. Conversely, Altcoin Daily warned investors that ultra-optimistic targets like $0.01 are basically impossible:

“I heard someone talking about they bought SHIB because if it only goes to 1c next year then they will be a millionaire. This is literally not possible with SHIB’s current market cap. Learn how to value coins in market cap vs price.”

No ‘Uptober’ for BTC… Yet

Many members of the crypto community expected bitcoin’s (BTC) price to surge substantially throughout October since the month has historically been quite successful for the industry in general. 

The primary cryptocurrency, though, started the month on the wrong foot, dropping from over $65K at the end of September to $60K a few days later. It recovered some losses, rising to almost $64,000 on October 7 before taking another turn south. Currently, BTC trades at around $61,000, or a 5% decrease in the past two weeks. 

According to some market observers, the asset may soon return to the green track. X user Ash Crypto speculated that BTC has broken out from the falling wedge pattern in the weekly pattern and escaped the 6-month descending channel. As such, they predicted a possible “bounce from here.”