Bullish Ripple Ruling May Have Triggered Altcoin Season: CryptoQuant Analysis

The landmark victory for Ripple in its lawsuit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may have ignited a bull market for neighboring altcoins, according to a recent report from CryptoQuant.

The crypto market intelligence firm provided a series of stats reflecting growth in altcoin market activity over the past week, versus relative stagnancy within the Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) markets.

The Return of Alt Season

When analyzing price performance based on market capitalization, CryptoQuant’s data shows that MidCaps, which include XRP, outperformed other groups of cryptocurrencies, soaring by 29% on June 13th.

This included other cryptocurrencies that had previously been categorized as securities by the SEC in its lawsuit against Coinbase last month. The movements in the market caps of such coins – including Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), and others – are plotted against those of BTC and ETH in the chart below.

Received on July 13, the summary judgment in the Ripple V. SEC lawsuit ruled that XRP itself is not a security, nor are sales of the token on secondary markets securities transactions.

This marks the first time a cryptocurrency company has successfully fought off the SEC’s claims in a legal case that all crypto assets aside from Bitcoin are securities.

Bitcoin Unaffected

Though Bitcoin briefly rallied to $31,700 after the landmark ruling, its price has since retraced to ~$30,000 and remains rangebound.

Failing to maintain an elevated price level, the top asset’s market dominance has partially fallen, putting it back under 50%, according to TradingView.

Bitcoin’s open interest also remained unaffected, despite ETH open interest rising substantially from $2.2 million to $2.7 million since that time. In terms of funding rates, XRP doesn’t appear to have substantially affected market sentiment.

“We can witness mixed sentiments among derivatives traders as Bitcoin funding is relatively high while Ethereum’s funding rates just turned negative,” wrote CryptoQuant.

Finally, analysts found that short-term sentiment among traders remains negative when observing Bitcoin and Ethereum’s Taker Buy Sell Ratio – a measure of buy and sell pressure for each asset. Both cryptos ratios are current <1, meaning taker buy volumes are greater than taker sell volumes, reflecting bearish attitudes.