Ripple price analysis: XRP/USD bears smell blood as the coin drops below $0.4800

XRP/USD is changing hands at $0.4697, losing 3% in recent 24 ours. The downside momentum may be gaining traction following the breakthrough below critical support $0.4800. The third largest coin has the market capitalization of $18.8B, while an average daily trading volume is registered at $395B.

What’s going on

Patrick Griffin, the EVP of Business Development at Ripple named scalability as one of the biggest issues of the cryptocurrency universe as it limits the usability and practical utility of the existing platforms, especially when compared to such services like VISA and MasterCard, crypto media outlet AMB Crypto reports.

“When people talk about Bitcoin, this is a system that can only handle about seven transactions per second when compared to Visa or MasterCard, which are handling tens of thousands of transactions a second and at over capacity.”

Speaking about regulation, he added that the traditional financial regulation rules and practices can be applied to Distributed Ledger Technology [DLT].

“The protections that have been put in place today fit nicely on top of this infrastructure and this infrastructure is really just about facilitating settlement and clearing out obligations and removing exposures and credit that are incurred over the course of payments,”

XRP/USD, the technical picture

From the technical point of view, XRP/USD is trying to break $0.4700 with the Asian low registered at $0.4670. Once itis cleared, the sell-off will gain traction and push the price towards $0.4400-$0.4430, which is a congestion zone that served as a launching ground for a recovery at the end of September.

On the upside, the local resistance is produced by the psychological $0.4800, followed by $0.4842 (Tuesday's high).  Once this hurdle is out of the way, the recovery may be extended towards $0.50 (also, Monday's high) and $0.5094 (SMA50, 4-hour).

XRP/USD, 4-hour chart