In the chaotic aftermath of last week’s market-wide wipeout, one granular forensic stands out: order-book depth on major venues thinned to “air,” letting relatively modest market orders rip through price levels with almost no resistance.
The phenomenon, captured by independent market analyst Dom (@traderview2) on X, is now central to a stark takeaway for XRP: under the same microstructure conditions, price can mechanically gap as easily to $1.19 as to $20. It is not a forecast; it’s a statement about how quotes, liquidity, and matching engines behave under stress.
The hour everything broke was different. “Look closely right before 21:00 during that first leg down, nearly 20M USD market sold (shorts entering/longs liquidated). Bid side (blue) goes from $50M to near zero… At this point, XRP is near $2.50 while all liquidity under it is basically gone, air.” Minutes later, with “more sells… trickling into a basically air pocketed book,” price slid from “$2.50 to $1.19. Nobody replenished the book. MMs either pulled or just walked away to protect. These markets really are more fragile than most think,” he wrote.
That framing also addresses a common post-mortem question from traders staring at cumulative volume delta (CVD) prints that went vertical even as prices fell: net buy pressure can rise while price still drops if the best offers are yanked and re-quoted lower in milliseconds, forcing buyers to chase a descending ask.
The logic is symmetric: when quote liquidity vanishes above price, upside gaps can be as mechanically abrupt as downside air-pockets—hence Dom’s answer to whether a $2 to $10 or even $20 spike could happen “on the way up”: “Technically speaking, yes.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.46.
