XRP feeling frisky

XRP spiked by as much as 8% on Thursday. A parabloic 60-minute breakout from $0.53 to $0.57 happened just after about 9 a.m. (EST) on news that Grayscale is launching a new XRP Trust. A similar product was shelved by Grayscale in 2021 after the SEC sued Ripple, alleging it issued/offered XRP as an unregistered security.

That the digital asset management pioneer is reviving a closed-end fund for accredited investors who want exposure to XRP, the token closely associated with Ripple, in itself has prompted fresh speculation that Grayscale's action is a sign of the SEC’s willingness to finally settle the case (The Crypto Basic).

As of Friday morning at 8:15 a.m. (EST), XRP, seventh-largest digital asset, was $0.5633, per CoinGecko. That reflects an increase of 5% compared to the same time yesterday.

Bitcoin was able to hold down $58,000 for most of the day on Thursday. Today, the grip loosened. BTC is down 0.3% over the past 24 hours. A small, seemingly incremental decrease. And yet, the largest crypto hunched over at $57,900 was not a welcome sight for bulls consternated by the sidestepping experienced of late.

Solana also is sliding after previously proving sturdy. In the past seven days, SOL has been trading in a range of between as low as $123 and as high as $136, a mark hit last night. As of this morning, the No. 5 coin is $132 in the wake of a 2% loss in 24 hours. SOL dumping courtesy of the bankruptcy estate of FTX/Alameda apparently continues to be a thing while Solana's memecoin belching spree via Pump.fun seems played out. 

We just did a search for Electric Dog Modish (EDM), said to be one of the more significant creations to come out of the Pump.fun factory thus far in September -- and couldn't find it on CoinGecko. EDM does reportedly have a market cap of $3.4M. 

There is a six-week-old Solana-based memecoin called Fwog (FWOG) which has reached $85M in market cap; that's currently enough to snag the No. 441 spot on CoinGecko.

Earlier this summer, Pump.fun was spewing as many as 20,000 tokens a day. More recently, the number of such creations has dropped to about 6,000 per day. Note that fewer than 100 of these meme mints have ever gone on to achieve a market cap in excess of $1M.

“Pump.fun has become stale,” pseudonymous trader Bastille told Decrypt.

Solana's teeming with untapped potential. But it's probably not as a memecoin spawning ground. Rather, the future of Solana, viewed as a top Ethererum rival, could be tied to a most popular Ethereum-tied activity: liquid staking.

Based on the current levels of liquid staking within the Solana community (helped along by retail users who came for the memes but stayed for the DeFi), and extrapolating from Ethereum's experience doing the same kind of thing, ByBit researchers put forth the proposition that Solana staking could be on the cusp of five-fold growth.

Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) offer a tokenized equivalent of a pledged token, freeing it up to be deployed in other DeFi settings, maximizing earning a la a form of derivative instrument that of course is not without its own set of unique risks.

If there is sustained growth in retail adoption, ByBit Research told Cointelegraph, then Solana has a "huge potential for liquid staking due to its active staking community." Based on Ethereum’s LST market statistics, ByBit said, Solana’s LST market "could potentially grow to $18 billion.”