Retail traders are hoarding XRP and ether as both tokens fall, the type of crowd behavior that often precedes more declines than a rebound.
XRP attracted 3.02 bullish social media comments for every bearish on Monday, its most positive reading in five weeks, according to Santiment. Ether stood at 2.31 and bitcoin at 1.40, which the company classified as neutral. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum opened higher and faded throughout the day, so the biggest enthusiasm is landing on falling assets.
Sentiment readings like these are used as contrarian signals, because crowd enthusiasm typically peaks near local highs.
“Cryptocurrencies typically move opposite to what the crowd loudly expects,” Santiment wrote, adding that strong optimism in XRP or ether as prices fall can add short-term downside risk or dampen any rebound.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s flat reading is the healthiest. Retail trading chasing smaller tokens while remaining neutral on bitcoin is limited speculation, not widespread greed, and protests have more room when the crowd has not yet focused on higher price trading. XRP traded near $1.09 on Monday, down for the week.
