• The price of Ripple’s XRP rose briefly to over USD 7,000 on Coinbase on 4 January 2019.
• According to experts, the price explosion is due to a bug in the exchange, as a similar situation was already observed in October last year.

Experienced traders and newcomers were astonished when they looked at the price of XRP on the 1-minute chart of Coinbase yesterday. The price for a single XRP token has risen to over 7,000 USD in the short term. Trader Larry Swanson announced on Twitter that XRP reached the unrealistic price of 7,308 USD in the 1-minute chart of Coinbase.

XRP hits $7308.00 in a 1 minute candle seen on the Daily Chart on Coinbase.

Just another "Glitch" pic.twitter.com/hv6QYfWIC2

— CryptOG ☀️🕊 ♎️⚡ (@AzAscend) January 4, 2020

At the same time, the price of BIitcoin was just about USD 7,308, so Swanson concludes that this may have been due to a system error that swapped both assets. On the right dashboard, the price of XRP is still just under USD 0.20, while the candle on the 1-minute chart (on the left) is well over USD 7,000.

The community is currently discussing who might have benefited from this alleged error. Other voices describe that such events have not been rare and have occurred in the past. The Twitter user Tittlet was able to document a similar situation already in October last year.

I caught this same thing back in October. It was the BTC price. pic.twitter.com/ag7ROuXUT4

— Tlittlet (@TimLittleton6) January 5, 2020

In this case the price of BTC was displayed in the chart of XRP as well. Another Twitter user called Bearable Bull also noted the occurrence of such “false price explosions” and explained:

$7308 XRP “glitch”. More coincidences.
Seems like they are losing control of price suppression.
Not saying it’s gonna get that high.
But certainly happening way too frequently for it to be nothin.

The XRP community is currently investigating other possible reasons for this strange price glitch. However, according to the official trading data of Coinbase, probably nobody could benefit from the alleged bug. Furthermore there are no known hacker attacks or other documented errors in the operation of the exchange.

Crypto exchanges like Coinbase use third party providers like Deribit to calculate the BTC price index. Thus at the end of October 2019 the BTC price on Coinbase Pro crashed because Deribit recorded an error in its own system. At this point Coinbase Pro had to stop operation at short notice. At that time many stop orders and liquidations were triggered on Coinbase, which led to an unpredictable development of trading. The damage for Deribit was estimated by the CEO to be about 1.3 billion USD.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP continue to trend sideways

After Bitcoin fell below the USD 6,900 mark on January 3, investors had expected the price to fall even further. However, Bitcoin was able to initiate a short-term trend reversal and stands at just under USD 7,579 at the time of writing.

Ethereum was able to rise to around 140 USD in the past 24 hours. XRP, on the other hand, seems to be still caught in a sideways movement and only recorded a slight price increase of 0.73% to USD 0.1981.

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