The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s largest derivatives market, has announced that it will launch Ripple (XRP) futures contracts on its trading platform starting next month. This decision follows the increased attention to XRP and significant growth in its network usage. According to CME’s official announcement, these contracts will be offered in two sizes of 2,500 and 50,000 units, allowing investors to manage risks against Ripple’s fluctuations. Alongside this important news, recent data shows that in the past four days, Ripple network activity has surged by 600% in terms of payment volume and number of transactions. Just on April 23, the volume of inter-account payments exceeded 838 million XRP units with over 11.7 million transactions recorded. This increase indicates a real growth in the use of the Ripple network and not just speculative movements. From a technical perspective, XRP attempted to break out of a multi-month downtrend channel and succeeded in breaking the 50 and 100-day moving averages. However, Ripple’s upward trend was halted around the $2.18 resistance level, and XRP is currently trading around $2.15. If it retests and consolidates above this level, the path for XRP to reach $2.4 to $2.5 will become smoother. But if Ripple’s price falls below the psychological $2 level and there are indications of network weakness, further correction is likely. Ripple, currently ranked fourth in the cryptocurrency market with a market capitalization of $126.6 billion, has seen over a 9% growth in the past 14 days. With the launch of futures contracts on CME and significant growth in network activity, XRP has once again captured investors’ attention and if these conditions remain stable, it could initiate a new bullish trend in Ripple. You can view the live prices of all tokens and cryptocurrencies on the digital currencies’ instant price page.
