Sonic, the decentralized finance blockchain, has joined forces with Web3 platform Kaito in a move that will see users who drive the conversation around the Sonic token and ecosystem rewarded in the Sonic Season 2 airdrop. Kaito’s ecosystem rewards its…

Sonic teams up with Kaito to reward Yappers in S token airdrop

A federal judge has rejected Ripple and the SEC&#8217;s proposed $50 million 
settlement, but social media sentiment around XRP has turned bullish anyway. 
Ripple-SEC Settlement Stalled After Court Rejection The Ripple-SEC case seemed 
to be moving forward after both parties agreed on a reduced $50 million 
settlement, but the joint motion for an indicative ruling has now been 
rejected in court. According to the filing shared by defense lawyer James K. 
Filian in an X post, the two haven&#8217;t &#8220;come close&#8221; to showing exceptional 
circumstances outweighing public interest or the administration of justice 
that would justify modifying the judgment. This means that the original fine 
of $125 million still stands for Ripple. Related Reading: Bitcoin Binance Open 
Interest Shoots Up: Warning For BTC? Following the news, XRP has taken a 
bearish hit to its price, as the below chart displays. The asset was trading 
around $2.15 at the time the news broke out, but it has since fallen below 
$2.09, implying a decrease of around 3%. Naturally, this reaction is quite 
mild by the cryptocurrency sector&#8217;s standards, but could still suggest some 
panic selling. Sentiment among the retail crowd, however, has seen a 
surprising jump, as per social media data. XRP Sentiment On Social Media Has 
Seen A Bullish Jump In a new post on X, the analytics firm Santiment has 
talked about how the social media users have responded to news of the Ripple- 
SEC case stalling. The indicator shared by Santiment is the &#8220;Positive/Negative 
Sentiment,&#8221; gauging the ratio between positive and negative comments involving 
a given coin on the major social media platforms. The indicator separates 
between positive and negative posts/threads/messages on the platforms using a 
machine-learning model and determines how the counts of the two compare. Here 
is a chart that shows the latest trend in the metric for Bitcoin, Ethereum, 
and XRP: As displayed in the above graph, the Positive/Negative Sentiment is 
currently above the 1 mark for all three of these cryptocurrencies, indicating 
that posts pertaining to bullish sentiment outweigh the bearish ones. Related 
Reading: Bitcoin Retests $108,000, But Holders Disagree On Direction For 
Bitcoin and Ethereum, however, the positive comments only have a slight 
advantage, meaning that while optimism does exist among the crowd, it&#8217;s quite 
mild. From the chart, it&#8217;s visible that XRP has diverged from these assets 
with a sharp spike, which has taken its Positive/Negative Sentiment to a value 
of 2.1. This is the highest level for the cryptocurrency in 17 days and 
corresponds to there being more than double as many bullish calls as bearish 
ones. Often, retail sentiment acts as a contrarian signal, with extreme values 
in either direction leading to some sort of reversal in the price. As such, 
while this development in crowd mentality could potentially imply investors 
aren&#8217;t worried about the news, the indicator could still be to keep an eye on. 
Featured image from Dall-E, Santiment.net, chart from TradingView.com

XRP Down 3% After SEC Settlement Stalls, But Social Media Turns Bullish

XRP whale flows flipped bullish in May after months of outflows, hinting at a 
potential triple-digit price rally.

XRP price saw month-long 420% rally the last time this metric turned green

CME’s launch of XRP futures has surged past $542 million in trading volume, 
signaling rising global demand and fueling bullish projections for crypto 
markets into 2025. XRP Futures Surge on CME, Reinforcing Optimistic 2025 
Projections Across Finance A month into its debut, XRP futures have sparked a 
new wave of institutional and retail interest in […]

XRP Futures on CME Signal Strong 2025 Outlook With Surging Institutional Adoption

In a post on 27 June, crypto-market chartist Dr Cat (@DoctorCatX) warned that 
Bitcoin’s ostensibly bullish weekly structure may be concealing a latent “time 
bomb” that could detonate if bulls fail to force a decisive breakout over the 
next three to four weeks. The technician’s diagnosis hinges on a classic 
Ichimoku paradox: an expanding bullish kumo and a flat Kijun Sen on the weekly 
timeframe are clustering with a constellation of bearish warnings on the daily 
and two-day charts. Bitcoin Faces A July Time Bomb “Look at the weekly kumo: 
it’s expanding, widening,” Dr Cat began. “This means that bullish momentum is 
building for potential trend sustainability even though the trend is not 
active as Kijun Sen is flat.” The observation is significant because an 
enlarging kumo—formed by the Senkou Span A/B envelope—generally represents 
thickening support, making sudden breakdowns statistically less probable as 
long as the cloud keeps widening. Related Reading: Is The Bitcoin Top In? 
Bitcoin MVRV-Score Has The Answer At the same time, the Chikou Span (CS) is 
“above the candles without a gap,” but, Dr Cat cautioned, it has “4 weeks 
deadline to close above ATH or will enter the candles.” Should the lagging 
line be absorbed back into price, the textbook interpretation is a loss of 
bullish conviction at the largest visible scale. That ostensibly constructive 
weekly backdrop contrasts starkly with a “lot of red flags on the daily 
hinting for a bearish scenario which can escalate on many levels.” Among those 
alarms is the prospect of a death TK cross on the two-day chart, anticipated 
“tonight,” in which the Tenkan Sen slips below the Kijun Sen—often the prelude 
to a down-leg when it materialises beneath the cloud. “So how do you interpret 
such conflicting information from different timeframes?” the analyst asked 
rhetorically, underscoring that traders who privilege only a single interval 
risk being blindsided. Dr Cat’s answer is a roadmap defined by time. Because 
the weekly cloud continues expanding, “it is hard for the price to dump a lot” 
immediately; historically, the kumo “needs first to become flat.” The 
flattening mechanism is mechanical: if Bitcoin fails to record a fresh all- 
time high “in 2 weeks from now,” roughly by the week that begins 14 July, the 
leading Senkou Span A numerator will stop rising, truncating cloud expansion. 
That in turn opens a window for gravity to reassert itself on the higher 
timeframe. Against that backdrop the analyst offered two conditional 
trajectories. First scenario: bearish signals on the lower charts mature. “The 
price will likely need at least 1.5 month or so for a very big dump on the 
weekly scale, because the weekly kumo will keep expanding for 2 more weeks,” 
Dr Cat wrote. During that holding period the market could “range around / just 
do small dumps to the $90s,” a reference to the high-$90 000 zone that has 
defined range lows since late spring. Should this grind continue beyond the 
second half of July without a structural shift on daily Ichimoku metrics, 
weekly momentum would invert: the kumo would cease expanding and the CS would 
dive into prior candles, removing two of the most durable layers of longer- 
term support. Related Reading: Top Analyst Predicts New Bitcoin Peak Timeline 
And ‘Double Cycle Blowoff’ Second scenario: bulls seize the initiative. To 
“save the chart from the warning signs,” buyers must engineer “a higher high 
above the $110,600 high shortly after the 27th of June,” thereby invalidating 
the bearish daily setup and re-energising the top-down trend. Time is 
critical: after “the week starting on 14th of July,” the CS will approach 
prior candlesticks, making each subsequent failure to print a new high 
proportionally more damaging. Dr Cat locates a final decision node on “the 
Sunday of the week starting on the 14th of July”—20 July—when the interplay 
between a stalling cloud and an in-candle CS could arm an additional set of 
“red flags for bulls.” The post stops short of assigning explicit probability 
weightings to either outcome, but its construction implies that the market’s 
most consequential catalyst in mid-summer may not be macro data or ETF flows 
so much as a self-reflexive technical countdown visible to every chart-watcher 
who uses Ichimoku. With roughly three weeks remaining before the cloud loses 
upward curvature, participants must choose between forcing a breakout above 
$110,600 or bracing for a higher-time-frame correction that could test 
sub-$100 000 territory. Whether Bitcoin’s expanding cloud proves a shield or a 
trap is, by Dr Cat’s own framing, “hidden in plain sight.” For now, the 
bullish weekly silhouette buys bulls breathing-room, but the daily and two-day 
warnings ensure that every hour the asset trades side-ways the theoretical 
time bomb ticks louder. At press time, BTC traded at $106,778. Featured image 
created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Analyst Spots Bitcoin Time Bomb Hidden In Bullish Weekly Chart

Bitcoin trades near key support at $104,000, but weak volume, fading onchain 
metrics, and sticky inflation point to more price consolidation.