Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency has fallen by more than 11 percent from its high of $2.12 on Saturday and more than 51 percent from its all time high of $3.84.
Ripple opened at $2.02 today (January 14) but has since slipped to less than $1.90.
The digital currency briefly claimed second place in the crypto charts earlier this week, boasting a market capitalisation of more than £90billion ($123billion).
But a difficult few days has seen Ripple’s market cap plummet to less than £53.2billion ($73billion). Ethereum has now overtaken as the second biggest cryptocurrency, pushing XRP back to third.
The CoinMarketCap currency tracker below shows the latest XRP price in real time
Why is Ripple going down?
Ripple’s most recent dip could be down to confusion over whether the South Korean government plans to ban the trading of cryptocurrencies.
On Thursday, Justice Minister Park Sang-ki sent shockwaves through the market when he announced: “There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and the justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges.”
The Korean government has since distanced itself from the comments, saying: “All government ministries agree on the need for a government response to an overheating in cryptocurrency speculation and for a degree of regulation.
The issue of banning exchanges that the justice minister talked about yesterday is a proposal by the Justice Ministry and it needs more coordination among ministries.”
Every crypto is priced at a 30 percent premium in South Korea
Greg Dwyer, of BitMex
Price charts covering the past seven days show that Ripple first started faltering on Monday, when its value nosedived from $3.19 at 4.54am to just over $2.60 an hour later.
Ripple executives blamed the sudden drop on cryptocurrency tracker CoinMarketCap’s decision to remove data from South Korean exchanges from its calculations.
XRP is widely traded at a premium in South Korea so the market plunged about 30 percent as a result.