Ripple’s XRP is up by over 5% at the start of Monday, helped by the bullish sentiment surrounding Bitcoin, extending its 6.20% gains registered on Sunday. At the time of writing, XRP/USD is trading at around $0.87.

After trading bearish for most of the past couple of weeks, things seem to be looking up for the digital asset as for the market at large. The driver behind the reversal of the sentiment was Tesla CEO Elon Musk who was at it again despite recent warnings from hacker group Anonymous. On Sunday, Musk tweeted that his company sold around 10% of its BTC holding to test the market but would look at resuming accepting cryptocurrencies as payment once it is confirmed that 50% of the energy used for Bitcoin mining comes from clean energy sources.

XRP is also likely to find support from a recent proposal by Ripple for a significant upgrade to its platform, one that could implement DeFi and smart contract capabilities. The proposal was put out by Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, in the form of a blog post on the official company website a week ago but has received considerable interest from the community since then. However, such a proposal for the ‘Federated Sidechains’ would require at least 80% approval from validators of RippleNet and this rating should stay at such a high level for at least two weeks before it can be implemented.

XRP’s whales have also increased their activity, trying to get in on the recent market action driven by the rise in volatility. According to Whale Alert, one such whale transferred 176 million XRP coins from a wallet on Saturday, 12 June – which works out to a value of around $146 million.

Key Levels to Watch

Most of the smaller moving averages as well as leading technical indicator MACD are suggesting a bullish bias in the H4 chart for XRP/USD. Right now, the XRP is trading just below the pivot point which sits at $0.88.

Once buyers manage to take the price past this point, it opens the room for the uptrend to strengthen further. They will then encounter resistance just before crossing the key $1 level at $0.97, and once this is crossed, expect the next resistance to act as a hurdle at $1.07.