Ripple: Will the new “witness” turn the XRP situation around?

The troubles of Ripple [XRP] with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) still haven’t ended. Despite a third interference and CEO Brad Garlinghouse to propose new strategies, the matter is still pending for a long time.

Interestingly, there was a twist in the Ripple chain involving a “witness”. However, this witness has nothing to do with the SEC case. Instead, its function should help tremendously with the XRP ledger sidechain, according to Ripple developers.

I testify

Since September 2, RippleX, the department that houses the developers of Ripple, announcement that it was making changes to the XRP Ledger (XPRL). According to Scott Deteran, who led the statement, Ripple had been working on the update since 2021.

The new proposal, which has not been fully implemented, was to replace ‘federator’ with ‘witness’. For a long time, the backbone was responsible for connecting the side chains to the mainnet.

Now Ripple wants to add the cookie function to allow XRP to keep Ethereum [ETH] on its heels by integrating smart contracts. If fully implemented, Ripple developers said users would be able to perform cross-chain transactions using the XRPL sidechain.

Besides these possible benefits, the witness would also eliminate the need for any wavy code base. As a result, users could transact in a much simpler way without bug complexities.

Has XRP Followed?

While it may seem too early to expect an XRP reaction, there have been a few notable developments. Cryptocurrency watchdog WhaleAlert has reported that there have been large XRP transactions recently. According to its Twitter page, three transfers of XRP whales happened in quick succession. They all represented 144.3 million XRP tokens worth $48 million.

🚨 54,300,000 #XRP (18,055,670 USD) transferred from #bitso to an unknown wallethttps://t.co/GPb8a0TlNt

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 2, 2022

Santiment data too confirmed that whale activity above $1 million has increased. However, these signs of glory did not extend to XRP volume which was up 5.60% at $881.49 million at the time of writing.

Beyond volume, XRP price was also consolidating at $0.32 at press time. However, as of September 2, the altcoin was up 1.57% and the price stood at $0.33. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) indicated that investors might need to be calm if initially bullish. As the RSI value was somewhat neutral at 49.54, the Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) revealed that retail investors might currently be interested in accumulating XRP.

CMF remained in the negative, and perhaps XRP could use more of a push than a chain upgrade.