BlockchainX News

Ripple price prediction leans bullish after recent gains, but is $2.50 the final wall standing between XRP and a return to larger macro trendlines?

Ripple rallies amid positive momentum
After spending much of April trading within a relatively stable range, Ripple xrp3.06%XRP, the native token of the Ripple network, is beginning to show signs of a steady recovery. As of Apr. 28, XRP is priced around $2.32, reflecting a 7% gain over the past 24 hours. 
Over the past week, XRP has climbed about 10%, continuing a gradual rebound from its early April low near $1.64. The token’s trajectory appears to be gaining consistency, supported by renewed interest and a series of positive catalysts linked directly to the Ripple ecosystem.
Amid this, trading activity has remained strong during this period. Daily trading volume has hovered around $5.2 billion over the last 24 hours, indicating sustained market engagement. 
Meanwhile, XRP’s market cap is now approaching $136 billion, securing its position as the fourth-largest crypto by market value.
With XRP gaining momentum, what does the Ripple price prediction suggest about where it could go next? Let’s find out.

$XRP

Today’s edition of the weekly recap covers President Donald Trump’s planned dinner with top TRUMP token holders, Strategy’s continued Bitcoin acquisitions, and the new SEC chair’s pro-cryptocurrency stance.

Trump plans dinner with top meme coin holdersPresident Donald Trump intends to host an “intimate private dinner” on May 22 at Trump National Golf Club near Washington for the top 220 holders of TRUMP 
Official Trump
trump3.32%Official Trump. The top 25 coin holders will receive additional privileges, including a pre-dinner reception with the President and a White House tour.Organizers of the $TRUMP Gala Dinner have stated in a legal disclaimer that they may cancel or reschedule the event at their discretion. If Trump cannot attend or the event is canceled for any reason, qualified token holders may receive a limited-edition TRUMP NFT instead.Democrats argue that the dinner is an impeachable offense since Trump is essentially “granting audiences to people” who buy his meme coin, which directly enriches the Trump family.New SEC chair criticizes previous leadersRecently sworn-in SEC Chair Paul Atkins delivered his first full address Friday and criticized the agency’s previous approach under former Chair Gary Gensler and the Biden administration. He stated that “innovation has unfortunately been stifled… due to market and regulatory uncertainty.”This is a common argument among crypto bulls. Gensler, during his tenure, felt that crypto didn’t need new rules — that most tokens were already unregistered securities, and existing law just needed to be enforced. Also, the crypto industry is plagued by scams and frequent collapses (i.e., FTX, Terra/Luna, Celsius, etc.). Retail investors lost billions of dollars.

Memecoins have long been misunderstood, and amongst their great utility, there is an emerging perception that memecoins are simply conduits for celebrity-driven pump-and-dump schemes designed to rip the masses off. Despite this perception, and whilst some memecoins have certainly channelled a lot of capital into a small number of hands, this is far from the norm. Many memecoins can, and do, offer utility to users—from fractionalisation to predictive markets.

The focus must be on utility
More must be done to shift this negative and overriding perception—if this misleading narrative is left to fester and grow, it could risk causing industry-wide damage. The memecoin industry must collectively do more to highlight the unique innovation behind memecoins and their utility for not just the crypto market but broader society, too. To develop projects that demonstrate this, AI is the best co-pilot.
The role of AI
AI agents are finely tuned to perform specialised tasks and make decisions with minimal or no human intervention, and they are deservedly having their moment in the spotlight. They supersede their less able genAI predecessors thanks to superior flexibility and intelligence, and in recent years, they have entered a transitional phase away from hype, speculation, and experimental novelties towards powerful real-world tools. 
They have transformed the tech space and are now an everyday tool for many businesses and consumers, applied to all forms of tech from user-facing technologies in self-driving cars to fraud detection technology. Yet the memecoin industry is still to capitalise on the benefits AI agents can offer—developers should harness the potential of AI in the development of their projects.
If AI agents are applied in the right way, they offer a smart way to draw out the utility of memecoins and the broader application of AI agents across financial practices. This can be through integrating AI agents into the tokens directly or deploying AI agents to complement memecoin activity.

Ethereum Foundation has clarified that the upcoming Pectra upgrade will not include the highly debated EOF changes as those will come with the next upgrade, Fusaka.

In his April 28 post on X, Ethereum Foundation Co-executive Director Tomasz K. Stańczak said that the upcoming Pectra upgrade, slated for May 7, does not include EOF, stating:
“The Pectra upgrade does not include EOF, nor [is it] intended to include EOF. Everything on Pectra is going as planned for the May 7th release.”
EOF, which stands for Object Format, is a major overhaul of Ethereum’s execution engine intended to optimize and modularize the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The EOF proposal has sparked intense debate among Ethereum developers in recent months, with many criticizing it for its unnecessary complexity.

Cryptocurrency lending firm Nexo is re-entering operations in the United States, nearly two years after settling a $45 million fine with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its unregistered lending product.

In an X announcement on Monday, Nexo revealed that retail and institutional clients in the U.S. will now have access to Nexo’s products, including “high-yield crypto savings accounts, asset-backed credit lines, advanced trading, and institutional-grade liquidity solutions.”
Nexo’s return follows its settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2023, after the Commission charged the company with failing to register its Earn Interest Product, a crypto lending offering marketed to U.S. investors. Nexo did not admit or deny wrongdoing in the settlement.

According to an official announcement, PancakeSwap PancakeSwap
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PancakeSwap has rebranded PancakeSwap v4 to PancakeSwap Infinity. Initially launching on BNB Chain, PancakeSwap Infinity plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.
The rebrand rolls out with a major upgrade, which introduces several technical improvements intended to improve trading experience and liquidity provision.
First off, the update includes support for multiple liquidity pool types, enabling liquidity providers to choose between concentrated liquidity and simpler models based on their strategies. Currently, PancakeSwap Infinity supports CLAMM (Concentrated Liquidity AMM) and LBAMM (Liquidity Book AMM).