And now the final piece of the puzzle:
What we are witnessing for the past three weeks is a major flee of crypto-capital from South Korea to "safer" places. Let me elaborate a bit:
- on December 12th there was an emergency meeting of SK regulators who discussed the imposition of stricter regulations for exchanges as well as the possibility of taxing capital gains from crypto-trading. Everyone expected the rules to be enforced then, but no ... they were only "discussed"
- two days ago SK announced the effective date for the new regulations, January 1st 2018
- this time frame matches exactly the start of the BTC "correction" when early "investors" started to close their positions and take profits. The "mass" of investors followed around Christmas and triggered the 30% decline in BTC. In the meantime, the same early "investors took advantage of the increased media coverage for Ripple and started to pump / buy XRP. All those can be verified, since Bithumb was and still is the major driver of the XRP price.
Now, to put the cherry on top, XRP will be the victim of its success, if indeed Coinbase will add support for it in early January (as the rumors have it). What this means is that all those money moved from BTC / KRW into XRP will be offloaded into the US market, taking advantage of the huge money influx that will cause.
To add to the picture, at this moment LTC price is being kept low by huge exposure to BCH through the OKex, based in Hong Kong. BCH price has seen a big pump a few days ago, followed by a massive Coinbase suspicion of inside trading.
So, it all adds up now, at least IMHO, what this is all about.
Happy trading :)