XRP’s ‘Bearish Skew’ Persists Amid 10% Price Slide Following SEC Appeal and ETF Filing

XRP’s (XRP) options market shows a greater risk of an extended price decline than renewed gains as renewed regulatory uncertainty overshadows Bitwise’s ETF filing and weighs over the cryptocurrency’s price.

On Monday, asset manager Bitwise submitted an S-1 form to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), filing for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that would invest in XRP. Bitcoin and ether spot ETFs, which debuted in the U.S. early this year, have pulled in billions of dollars in investor money.

However, to the dismay of XRP bulls, Bitwise’s action was quickly followed by the SEC filing a notice of appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, pushing back against Judge Analisa Torres’s two-month-old ruling that fintech company Ripple Labs did not violate programmatic sales to retail exchanges did not violate securities rules.

Four years ago, the SEC charged Ripple with selling unregistered securities after the platform sold $1.3 billion worth of XRP. While Ripple is a fintech company dedicated to building a global payments network, XRP is an independent digital asset for online payments and currency swaps.

Being categorized as security is widely seen as a bearish development in the crypto market, as securities are more tightly regulated than commodities and demand greater reporting and transparency by companies.

As such, XRP has declined by 11% to 53.7 cents in the past 24 hours, taking the week-to-date loss to over 16%, according to data sources CoinDesk and Coingecko. It’s the third worst-performing cryptocurrency among the top 100 coins by market value. Market leaders bitcoin and ether are down 0.5% and 3.7%, respectively.

Options traders on Deribit seem relatively more bearish on XRP than bitcoin and ether, according to the seven-day call-put skew, which measures the difference between call and put volatility (demand).

At press time, XRP’s seven-day skew was -3.2%, a sign of bias for puts offering protection against price slides. BTC and ETH’s seven-day skews were 0% or neutral and 2.8%, according to data source Amberdata.

Meanwhile, funding rates in the XRP perpetual futures market have turned positive, reversing the brief overnight negative flip, which represented a bearish bias.