XRP tokens linked to Ripple have seen a resurgence in positive discussions on social media, which historically serves as a contrarian indicator for price movements. On April 29, the token's positive-to-negative sentiment ratio on social media spiked into the "FOMO zone" with a reading of 3.9 on Santiment's tracker, the highest since March 19. This level of sentiment has typically preceded a sharp pullback in the token's price. The recent integration of XRP with Rakuten Pay, allowing users to convert points into XRP, has driven social media chatter to its second-highest bullish sentiment in two years.
This development has enabled an estimated 44 million Rakuten users to spend XRP at over 5 million merchant locations, trade it within the Rakuten Pay app, and convert their Rakuten points directly into XRP. Despite the excitement, XRP's price has not reflected the social hype, trading at $1.37 on Thursday with a 2.1% decline over 24 hours and a 3.7% drop over the week.
Santiment's data suggests that crowd sentiment often leads price movements by 24 to 72 hours and that extremes in crowd sentiment have frequently marked reversals rather than continuations.