XRP traders were stunned after a single one-minute candle on Kraken’s XRP/USD pair showed price exploding to a high of $90.13 and collapsing to a low of $0.00286, before snapping back to around $2.179. The bizarre spike-and-crash sequence appeared only on Kraken, turning the candle into an instant talking point across the community.
Community member Kevin Cage was among the first to flag the anomaly, posting the chart on X with the comment: “XRP just got a super weird flashwick on Kraken and triggered my alerts..” The wick immediately raised questions, as the token on other major exchanges continued to trade normally around the $2 region with no corresponding move.
Has XRP ‘Really’ Hit $90?
In a widely shared response, community member Jay Grissom (@jfgrissom) offered a microstructure-based explanation. His summary was straightforward: “It could have been a really low volume order that was filled at a high price as part of [a] larger limit order.” Rather than a genuine, liquid market repricing, he framed the event as an artefact of how orders, cost basis and tiny trade sizes interact on an order book.
Grissom then “got on [his] cost basis is everything soap box” and used the token’s smallest unit, the “drop,” to illustrate the mechanics. One XRP equals one million drops, meaning you can trade extremely small fractions. If a trader buys just one drop, or 0.000001 XRP, for $0.01, then “technically” that micro-trade implies a price of $10,000 per token. On its own this looks absurd, but the notional size is only one cent.
He showed how that extreme micro-fill can vanish in the averages when embedded in a larger, normal-priced order. Suppose the same order also buys 5 XRP at $2.50 each, costing $12.50. Combined with the $0.01 spent on the single drop, the trader pays $12.51 for 5.000001 XRP.
The effective cost basis is about $2.502 per token. As Grissom put it, that single expensive drop “barely moves your average cost because it’s such a tiny fraction of your total holdings. You spent $0.01 on it versus $12.50 on everything else. The $10,000/token price point essentially disappears into statistical noise once it’s averaged against a meaningful position.”
What does not disappear is the trade print itself. Matching engines and charting systems still record the high and low of the candle at the exact prices where even dust-level trades occurred. In a thin order book, a handful of such anomalous fills is enough to generate a grotesque wick from sub-cent levels up to double-digit prices, even though the “real” market remains clustered near $2.
For traders, the Kraken episode is a textbook reminder that a dramatic candle on a single venue does not automatically signal genuine price discovery. Before treating a $90.13 high and a $0.00286 low as meaningful, it is essential to cross-check other exchanges and understand how tiny, irregular fills can distort low-timeframe charts in periods of fragile liquidity.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.146.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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