Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, has now explained the reasoning behind his XRP to $100 price target. He spoke about it on one of the latest episodes of the Memes and Markets podcast. Visit Website
XRP's network is growing substantially, with average transaction count slowly crawling up.
Regional cryptocurrency trends often reveal powerful sentiment shifts before global markets fully react. Local trading behavior, especially in highly active retail environments, can signal early accumulation phases or renewed speculative conviction. South Korea has long served as one of the clearest examples of this dynamic, and recent XRP activity has again drawn intense attention from analysts tracking momentum signals across international exchanges. Crypto commentator Cobb recently pointed to a striking surge in XRP trading dominance within the Korean market . Fresh data from Upbit and Bithumb shows XRP generating roughly $1.2 billion in 24-hour volume, dramatically surpassing the activity recorded for Bitcoin and Ethereum during the same window. This scale of concentration reinforces the long-standing pattern of Korean traders directing disproportionate liquidity toward XRP during pivotal market moments. $XRP absolutely gaps everything else when it comes to 24 hour volume in Korea pic.twitter.com/dbWMJMsXk8 — Cobb (@Cobb_XRPL) February 15, 2026 Korea’s Deep-Rooted XRP Trading Culture South Korea’s crypto ecosystem operates with a distinctly retail-driven structure that frequently amplifies momentum in select digital assets. Since 2018, XRP has maintained an unusually strong presence across Korean exchanges , often ranking among the most actively traded cryptocurrencies regardless of its global position. February 2026 figures, indicating that XRP captured more than 30 percent of total exchange activity, confirm that this preference remains firmly intact. This persistent dominance carries analytical importance because Korean volume surges have historically preceded broader market reactions. When liquidity expands rapidly in the region, global traders often interpret the movement as accumulation rather than short-lived speculation, particularly when the trend holds across multiple trading sessions. What High Volume Historically Means for Price Sustained increases in trading volume frequently signal strengthening conviction and improving liquidity depth. In past XRP cycles, similar spikes in participation have appeared ahead of meaningful price advances, suggesting that strong regional demand can act as an early catalyst for wider momentum. We are on X, follow us to connect with us :- @TimesTabloid1 — TimesTabloid (@TimesTabloid1) June 15, 2025 However, volume alone cannot guarantee continuation. Durable rallies typically require confirmation from derivatives markets, macro liquidity conditions, and participation across multiple geographic regions. Ripple’s expanding cross-border payment infrastructure and continued development of the XRP Ledger also shape long-term expectations. As real-world financial integrations grow, concentrated trading interest may reflect more than speculation. Even so, regulatory clarity in major jurisdictions still determines whether regional enthusiasm can translate into sustained global adoption. Interpreting Korea’s Latest Signal The current imbalance in Korean trading volume highlights persistent confidence rather than random activity. Strong retail participation, deep liquidity channels, and historical precedent all suggest that the movement deserves close attention from global market observers. Whether this surge evolves into a lasting rally will depend on broader capital inflows and continued structural progress within the XRP ecosystem. For now, South Korea once again places XRP at the center of market focus , reinforcing its reputation as an early indicator of sentiment shifts that the wider crypto market often recognizes only later. Disclaimer : This content is meant to inform and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author’s personal opinions and do not represent Times Tabloid’s opinion. Readers are urged to do in-depth research before making any investment decisions. Any action taken by the reader is strictly at their own risk. Times Tabloid is not responsible for any financial losses. Follow us on Twitter , Facebook , Telegram , and Google News The post XRP Absolutely Gaps Everything Else In Korea. Here’s the Latest appeared first on Times Tabloid .
Traders are wondering how low leading cryptocurrencies could fall if downside pressure intensifies amid bearish sentiment gripping the crypto markets.
The altcoin rallied 22.45% in an hour on Sunday, but has almost entirely retraced this bounce since then.
According to on-chain analyst Willy Woo, a long-running rise in Bitcoin’s value versus gold has stalled. He points to a break in a trend that ran for more than a decade. Related Reading: Bitcoin At $8,000? Michael Saylor Says Strategy Still Won’t Break The timing, he argues, lines up with when quantum computing showed up on the radar of Bitcoin developers and when the Quantum Bitcoin Summit took place. That change, he says, has altered how the market thinks about Bitcoin’s future. Quantum Fear And Lost Coins Reports have disclosed that roughly 4 million BTC are effectively out of circulation because their keys are lost. That number matters. Since 2020, corporate buyers and spot ETFs have taken close to 3 million BTC off the market. If some of those lost coins were eventually recovered using powerful quantum machines, supply would expand in a way that markets could not ignore. Woo gives the chance of a network hard fork that freezes any recovered coins at 25%. 12 YR TREND BROKEN. BTC should be a valued a LOT HIGHER relative to gold. Should be. IT’S NOT. The valuation trend broke down once QUANTUM came into awareness. Don’t read this post if you want to stay high on hopium instead of seeing things as they are. pic.twitter.com/Qa2YKDlRMp — Willy Woo (@willywoo) February 16, 2026 He also estimates a socalled Q-Day — the point where quantum machines can threaten today’s cryptography — to be about five to 15 years away. Markets, however, do not always wait for an event to actually happen before they price it in. Macro Money Favors Gold Right Now Reports note that broader financial cycles are pushing big pools of capital toward traditional hard assets. Long-term debt cycles are often followed by moves into things seen as safe havens. Sovereign funds and large investors have been piling into gold while Bitcoin stalls. The result: gold rallies while Bitcoin lags, and that gap is what analysts like Woo are trying to explain. Who Says It’s Not Quantum Panic Quantum fears around Bitcoin are not universally accepted. Blockstream CEO Adam Back has said the threat is distant and often overstated, arguing that if quantum computing advances far enough to challenge current encryption, Bitcoin can upgrade its cryptography through network consensus. In his view, the system has time to adjust before any real damage occurs. Prominent Bitcoin educator and author Andreas Antonopoulos has also pushed back, noting that quantum computers would affect banks, governments, and the entire internet—not just Bitcoin. He argues that global security standards would be strengthened long before Bitcoin faced a unique crisis, making the current concern premature. Yet Woo points to unusual flows, including activity by early-era holders. Reports say some Satoshi-era wallets have seen transfers over the last 12 months, and that behavior can change market sentiment fast. Sometimes a few large moves are enough to tilt prices for weeks. Related Reading: Urgent Crypto Reform: Treasury Secretary Says The Clock Is Ticking Bitcoin And Gold: Diverging Paths Amid Market Volatility At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $68,700, indicating market volatility due to the inability to sustain last year’s peak at around $126,000. Gold, for its part, is trading at around $4,950 per ounce due to safe-haven pressures driven by market uncertainty. Bitcoin is still a speculative asset, while gold is a traditional store of value, some analysts say. The correlation coefficient between Bitcoin and gold is relatively weak, almost to the point of being nil, suggesting that these two assets are not correlated and tend to move independently. Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
Alibaba Cloud has launched Qwen-3.5, its next-generation open artificial intelligence model, which the company claims can compete “with state-of-the-art leading models.” On the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Hangzhou-based tech company unveiled the latest iteration of its AI large language model Qwen. The new 3.5-series models were made available first on Alibaba’s flagship consumer AI app on Monday afternoon, followed by an official announcement made on social platform X at around 10:00 AM GMT. 🚀 Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is here: The first open-weight model in the Qwen3.5 series. 🖼️Native multimodal. Trained for real-world agents. ✨Powered by hybrid linear attention + sparse MoE and large-scale RL environment scaling. ⚡8.6x–19.0x decoding throughput vs Qwen3-Max 🌍201… pic.twitter.com/Pq0qIk54MB — Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) February 16, 2026 The launch comes during a week in which several Chinese AI firms released the new versions of their flagship AI systems, as Beijing grows its ambitions to surpass the West in AI capabilities. Alibaba Group’s shares fell 2.93% in global trading following the announcement, with the stock quoted at $25,160.00 as of February 13. The decline also extended to a five-day drop of nearly 6%, according to Google Finance data. China’s equity markets are closed for the Lunar New Year holiday from February 16 to February 23, with trading set to resume on February 24. Qwen-3.5 architecture sets sights on multimodal AI expansion According to Alibaba Cloud’s GitHub notes, Qwen-3.5 includes a unified vision-language foundation trained on trillions of multimodal tokens. The system can now process text, images, and structured inputs within a single framework. During development of the new LLM version, the company used an efficient hybrid architecture and Gated Delta Networks with sparse Mixture-of-Experts routing to increase throughput, limit latency, and reduce computing costs. The model has also increased its linguistic support to 201 languages and dialects to expand its deployment worldwide. A variant named Qwen-3.5-Open-Source was also released, featuring 397 billion parameters and a 256,000-token context window for longer reasoning chains and document processing. Despite releasing most of its AI LLM models as open source, Alibaba continues to keep its largest Max-series models closed for its commercial ecosystem. The official X account of the Alibaba Qwen development team posted performance charts alongside the announcement, comparing Qwen-3.5 to GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro. In the GPQA Diamond category, which measures graduate-level reasoning, Qwen-3.5 scored 88.7, coming third among the other LLMs. In IFBench, a test evaluating instruction-following accuracy, Qwen-3.5 recorded a score of 76.5, outperforming all the other models. The results place Alibaba’s model within striking distance of proprietary competitors such as Gemini, GPT-series systems, and Claude models in multilingual and agent-based workloads. China taps into open-source AI to compete with the US Over the past year, Chinese technology firms have doubled down on creating open-weight models, which is much different from the closed development approaches seen in Silicon Valley companies. Nearly every major Chinese AI developer introduced updated systems in the past seven days, with Alibaba’s DAMO Academy launching RynnBrain, a separate AI model aimed at robotics applications. The company’s RynnBrain demonstrations featured a robot equipped with pincers that counted oranges, placed them in a basket, and retrieved milk from a refrigerator. “One of its key innovations is built-in time and space awareness,” said Adina Yakefu, a researcher at Hugging Face. On February 12, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, debuted Seedance 2.0, a model capable of generating realistic videos from text prompts, images, or existing clips. On social media, users have been sharing samples of AI-generated videos featuring characters from Marvel comic movies, like Thanos. As reported by Cryptopolitan, Marvel rights owner Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter on Friday to ByteDance, accusing the firm of training the system on a “pirated library” of copyrighted characters. On Monday, ByteDance responded that it “respects intellectual property rights and has heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0.” “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users,” the company told reporters. Claim your free seat in an exclusive crypto trading community - limited to 1,000 members.
Metaplanet increased its revenue by 738% in 2025 with a BTC-focused model (58M USD). Reserves reached 35K BTC, but a price drop led to a 619M USD net loss. Weekly BTC chart is positive, NYSE ETF op...
Bitcoin’s recent move below $60,000 has reignited debate over whether the market is entering another prolonged cooling period. But for institutional participants, the latest volatility appears to be reinforcing a different narrative, one focused less on price action and more on governance, resilience, and long-term market structure. That theme was central at KuCoin Institutional’s inaugural Premiere 2026 gala in Hong Kong, which brought together more than 100 institutional clients and partners from across global markets. Rather than positioning the gathering as a celebration during favorable market conditions, KuCoin framed the event as an opportunity to assess how the industry responds when sentiment weakens and liquidity tightens. Opening remarks were delivered by KuCoin CEO BC Wong and COO Ethan Cheng, both of whom emphasized that volatility should not be treated as an exception in crypto markets but as a defining characteristic. The key question, they suggested, is not whether volatility will persist, but whether institutions and service providers can demonstrate maturity when it does. “Volatility is a natural feature of digital asset markets,” said BC Wong, CEO of KuCoin. “Long-term credibility is built not in periods of expansion, but through discipline, transparency, and robust risk management when market conditions are challenging.” His comments reflected a broader shift in institutional positioning across the industry. In earlier cycles, institutional adoption was often tied to rapid growth narratives and bullish momentum. Today, however, market participants appear increasingly focused on operational fundamentals, such as governance standards, counterparty risk frameworks, and execution quality. Ethan Cheng, COO of KuCoin, echoed that view, noting that institutional engagement is evolving beyond opportunistic exposure. “Institutional engagement in digital assets is increasingly driven by structural fundamentals rather than short-term price movements,” Cheng said. “Periods of volatility reinforce the importance of long-term alignment and risk-aware participation.” According to attendees, discussions throughout the evening reflected those priorities. Conversations centered on portfolio risk management strategies, liquidity dynamics, execution efficiency, and security standards. Participants exchanged perspectives on how institutional frameworks are adapting as the market matures, with emphasis placed on transparency, responsiveness, and the ability to operate through contraction cycles. The tone of the event stood in contrast to the speculative energy that defined previous bull markets. Instead of focusing on immediate upside potential, institutional representatives discussed how to preserve trust and maintain long-term positioning in a more cautious environment. KuCoin’s decision to host its first annual institutional gathering during a period of market uncertainty was viewed by some as a deliberate signal. The gala served both as a reflection on existing collaboration and an affirmation that institutional engagement does not disappear when conditions become less favorable. For institutions, market volatility is increasingly being treated as a stress test, not just of asset performance, but of governance discipline and operational infrastructure. As the industry expands its global footprint, maintaining standards during downturns may matter as much as performance during rallies. While Bitcoin’s near-term trajectory remains uncertain, the sentiment emerging from Hong Kong suggested a longer-term shift is underway. The institutional foundation of crypto, industry participants argued, is gradually being shaped not by speculation, but by a disciplined push toward a more mature global market structure. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Monday Morning Crypto Report: Europe leads Ripple USD on XRPL, while a dormant Ethereum ICO whale nets 6,335x profit. Plus, Solana ETFs see $31 million inflows as institutional demand stays "buoyant.".