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Doom

Moon or Doom: Where Does XRP Price Go Next?

by admin August 18, 2025

In brief

XRP is at a crossroads: does it head back up towards $4, or all the way back down to $2?
Myriad users say there’s a nearly 64% chance XRP shoots for the moon versus heading back towards doom.
Are they right? Let’s dive in.

The XRP Army has drawn the line: the $3 price mark is now their battlefield. But, at the moment, traders can’t seem to decide if XRP is headed to the moon or back down towards doom.

After hot inflation data dampened jumbo rate cut hopes earlier this week, XRP dropped 6.4%—right down to that pivotal $3.00 mark that could define the crypto asset’s next major move.

On Myriad, a prediction market created by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, traders remain slightly bullish despite the correction. Myriad users give XRP a 63.7% chance of reaching $4 or higher (the moon scenario) versus 36.3% odds of crashing back down to $2 or below (doom).

So who’s right?

XRP price: The technical puzzle

XRP, the cryptocurrency created by the founders of payments company Ripple, presents a technical puzzle that explains why traders are currently so divided.

For reference, even at just $3, XRP commands a market capitalization of $181 billion, good for third-largest behind only Bitcoin and Ethereum. And it’s coming off a very recent all-time high of $3.65, which the coin hit less than a month ago. So where is it going next?

For starters, the distance from its current price (the white line in the chart below) to the moon (the green line) and its distance towards doom (the red line) is basically the same: 33.33%. So, odds based on the percentage leap required to hit either scenario is not really a factor right now. It’s going to require a little further digging.

XRP price data. Image: Tradingview

One classic indicator for traders is the Relative Strength Index, or RSI. For XRP, this sits right at 48, just shy of the neutral 50 mark.

RSI measures momentum on a scale of 0-100, where readings above 70 signal overbought conditions (time to sell) and below 30 indicate oversold (time to buy). At 48, we’re in no-man’s land—slightly bearish but not enough to panic. This is what traders call the “decision zone,” where markets pick their next direction.

Going off RSI, under current conditions, market forces are in equilibrium. However, the overall trend is bullish, so this would signal to traders that prices are more likely to maintain momentum and speed unless something else affects the trend.

The Average Directional Index, or ADX, at 28 tells a more decisive story. ADX measures trend strength regardless of direction. Think of it as a speedometer that doesn’t care if you’re going forwards or backwards. Readings above 25 confirm a strong trend exists, and at 28, XRP is definitely trending. This signals to traders that XRP’s upward movement is likely to continue, even if slowly. And, of course, the more the price goes up, the less likely a $2 “doom” scenario becomes.

Another key indicator is the exponential moving average, which measures the average price of an asset over a certain amount of time. For XRP, the 50-day EMA sits comfortably above the 200-day EMA, creating what traders call a “bullish stack.”

This means the average price of XRP in the short-term is trading above the average price over the long-term, and that typically means buyers will keep stepping in at higher prices. It’s a vote of confidence in the uptrend. This setup usually favors continuation higher unless something breaks.

For XRP to correct down to the “doom” zone, it would need to switch momentum entirely and, likely, enter a death cross formation.

The only indicator that is not bullish for XRP right now seems to be the Squeeze Momentum Indicator, which shows a price consolidation zone as the Ripple-linked token struggles to break past its recent all-time high. Think of it as the market taking a deep breath before the next sprint.

Prices can experience a stronger trend either up or down, depending on catalysts. That “squeeze” zone is considered a price compression because there are a large number of orders fighting to determine the trend. If short-term traders exit those positions in search for other markets, then there could be a fast dip in the same zone as it could trigger many “stop-loss” zones. On the other hand, if there is a short squeeze, or bulls take control, it could trigger a spike based on buy orders activated too close to each other.

But technicals only tell half the story. The 30-day moving average for XRP whale inflows to exchanges jumped to 260 million tokens from 141 million tokens at July’s start, with large holders offloading nearly $6 billion worth since mid-July. That’s a serious distribution that historically precedes corrections, because the most logical reason to send an asset to an exchange is to sell it.

Meanwhile, the SEC and Ripple finally ended their legal battle, removing a major overhang. Add an 88% chance of spot XRP ETF approval by December according to Polymarket and nearly 60% preference over a Litecoin ETF on Myriad Markets, and you’ve got catalysts that could send XRP either direction—violently.

XRP bulls have the edge

Weighing all of the data, it’s clear the charts today slightly favor the XRP moon scenario. The combination of price respecting an upward channel, maintaining position above both key EMAs, and the Squeeze ready to fire would convince traders of a compelling bullish setup. The ADX confirming trend strength while RSI sits neutral gives XRP room to run without being overextended.

Considering indicators show traders in equilibrium during a bullish move (instead of showing such behavior when the coin is trading sideways), the ascending channel and compressed volatility suggest XRP could test $3.30 within days. A clean break above would likely trigger momentum toward $4.

But those massive whale sales keep the doom scenario very much alive. If the $2.80 support cracks, all bullish bets are off. This is crypto—and when things break, they break hard.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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August 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Doom: The Dark Ages’ path tracing upgrade tested – maximum fidelity, reasonable performance

by admin June 19, 2025

Doom: The Dark Ages has finally received its promised path tracing upgrade on PC, adding a further dimension of visual fidelity to an already impressive game. To see how the new graphics mode compares to the standard RT available at launch, some testing was in order.

I ran the game on a high-end desktop PC with an RTX 5090 graphics in the new path tracing mode, while my colleague John tested the game on a laptop RTX 5090 with standard RT graphics. It made for a fascinating comparison, with some areas exhibiting just how good the standard RT graphics already were, while other scenes showed off the kind of uniquely realistic visuals that only path tracing can provide.

We opted for the second mission in the game, Hebeth, as it includes plenty of Doombase-style shiny surfaces and therefore ought to be a good showcase for the new graphics techniques in play.

Here’s the full video comparison of the new path tracing graphics in Doom: The Dark Ages versus the standard RT available previously. Watch on YouTube

One of the first thing we noticed is that the cutscenes show relatively few changes in side-by-side comparisons. That’s because the cutscenes are authored with plenty of extra light sources placed just where they’re needed to light subjects with the cinematography in mind, in comparison to gameplay which needs to look correct no matter what the player is doing. Given that the game already featured ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), that means these controlled scenes tend to look fairly similar between a PC running with standard RT and path tracing.

Once in gameplay, the stone floors near the start of the level provide our first out-and-out difference versus the standard RT presentation. With path tracing enabled, these rougher surfaces provide reflections, with bright nearby objects clearly visible, even when off-screen. By contrast, the standard RT look has a more conservative roughness cut-off, with only shiny surfaces sporting reflections. This even extends to your weapons, with the shotgun and other armaments reflecting bright light sources in the path tracing mode.

Interestingly, these reflections are often more mirror-like and coherent in the standard RT mode to save performance, whereas the path tracing has a duller but more realistic (and expensive) look.

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The path tracing BVH also includes elements that are dropped in the standard RT mode when they don’t appear on-screen, most notably force-fields and holograms, but there’s plenty of other particles, leaves and transparencies too. Objects in the reflection also sport more complex materials, which is quite evident in the glossier environments found in the interiors of this level.

Of course, the path tracing mode isn’t just about reflections – it also uses a higher number of bounces for its global illumination. This can make some scenes noticeably lighter, eg allowing light to bounce multiple times to reach an interior space from the sun and sky outside.

You can see more objects in the reflection with path tracing engaged – such as the pickups here – as well as seeing reflections on rougher, less glossy surfaces. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

The path tracing mode also suffers from fewer incidents of light leaking through solid walls to illuminate areas it shouldn’t, thanks to its more fine-grained per-pixel light calculations. Having the better denoiser of ray reconstruction enabled in the path tracing mode also gets rid of the stippled look of volumetric lighting in the standard RT mode.

Emissives are another area where the path tracing mode looks significantly more realistic. Light sources in your environment, such as fires, gun tracers and even LED light strips, actually produce light that shines on its surroundings with path tracing enabled, something that’s disabled in the standard RT mode.

The difference in lighting can be significant, with the larger number of light bounces allowing more accurate lighting of darkened spaces. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

Emissive lighting is another feature enabled in the path tracing mode, allowing for a greater number of light sources – which can combine beautifully with the improved RTGI and reflections. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

There are relatively few differences in terms of shadows, with most scenes taking place indoors and already featuring quite sharp shadows. Instead, you’ll see more noticable changes outdoors, where long distance shadows are sometimes presented more clearly in the path tracing mode that are incredibly soft and diffuse in the standard RT mode, due to how coarse the calculations are to save performance. There’s less shadow break-up in outdoor scenes too.

Speaking of performance, the full path tracing mode is light – at least in relative terms. We saw around a 39 percent drop in frame-rate with path tracing engaged versus standard RT in our test scene, using a high-end PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D using 4K DLSS Performance and ultra nightmare settings.

The path tracing mode of Doom: The Dark Ages is expensive, as you’d expect, but it works out as being an average 39 percent drop in performance versus the standard RT – one of the lighter performance penalties we’ve seen from a path tracing mode. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

That’s a significant drop, but still a smaller margin than we’ve seen in other games, like Cyberpunk 2077. It speaks to both how much RT is provided in the base game – and how well architected id’s latest release is, as we’ve come to expect from the studio.

Going through this footage, one thing that struck me is just how scalable Doom: The Dark Ages is. The game still looks pretty reasonable even on “low” settings or on more limited consoles like the Xbox Series S, but there’s a huge assortment of visual niceties that you can add on if you have the performance to spare.

This new path tracing mode is the logical conclusion, bringing unparalled realism to the game’s fantastical environments for those on higher-end PCs – and earning major plaudits for id’s top-tier developers.

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June 19, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Six Brutal Metal Albums To Blast After Doom: The Dark Ages

by admin June 1, 2025

Screenshot: iD Software / Claire Jackson / Kotaku

Doom The Dark Ages is an interesting little beast. It’s still Doom at heart, in the vein of the last two games. But the vibe is just so very different, and not just because of the medieval setting. It’s the Army of Darkness of Doom games, if you follow. That goes double for the music, and while there’s, uh, obvious reasons for that. Fact remains, this is a game where you’re an absolute unit, ripping demons to shreds; but there’s way more Warhammer shit in its veins than before.

Doom 2016 and Eternal may have sparked a whole new fire under the djent-ier side of metal—to the point that there’s folks trying to make the name “Argent Metal” happen—but The Dark Ages is slotting into a deep tradition of metal portraying high-fantasy Hell, without swaying too far in either direction. So, if you were one of those folks who fell down a metal rabbit hole after the first two games, and need something to match the vibes a little better this time around, or if this is your first step into a larger, more brutal world, let’s walk you a little further down the path with an appropriate six more albums to go hunting down to keep the brutal times rolling long after you’ve Shield Sawed your last demon in half.

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June 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

These Doom: The Dark Ages Guitars Will Have You Ready To Conquer Hell

by admin May 29, 2025

Doom: The Dark Ages launched earlier this month, and if you’ve already finished the Doom Slayer’s prequel journey through Hell and a bizarre cosmic dimension, you don’t have to stop ripping and/or tearing just yet. Bethesda and Kramer Guitars have partnered to create three guitars based on the game, and they’re every bit as flashy and intense as the Slayer–but you’ll have to be lucky to get one.

The three guitars, which appear to be functionally identical and sport different Doom-related visual designs, are classic Kramer, featuring a Floyd Rose bridge and a single humbucker. The brand was well known in the ’80s for its shred-friendly axes, and the aesthetic certainly pairs well with a game as violent and over the top as Doom.

Glowing eyes not included

“The unique designs were carefully applied with multiple layers of paint across several weeks, and each focus on one of the powerful weapons in your arsenal: the Atlan, Serrat the Dragon, and the Doom Slayer himself,” reads the official announcement. They were created by illustrator Luke Preece, whose other work includes Gears of War: E-Day and art for bands like blink-182 and Metallica.

Now comes the bittersweet part: You can’t buy these guitars. Instead, Xbox will be giving them away via its Instagram accounts, with residents from the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands eligible to win. Alongside the three guitars, you can win a copy of Doom: The Dark Ages, the game’s collector’s edition, or special-edition Xbox controllers.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a great addition to the legendary series, focusing on brutal counter-attacks and close-quarters chaos. In our Doom: The Dark Ages review, Alessandro Barbosa called it “a finally tuned adventure that delivers the power fantasy of ripping and tearing through thousands of demons without losing an underlying complexity that makes each encounter engaging to blast through.” For more on Kramer Guitars, check out this hot dog monstrosity, which Sweetwater has mercifully stopped offering.

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May 29, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Boltgun 2 is real, and it’s bringing Doom to Chaos cultists in 2026

by admin May 24, 2025

Boltgun 2 has just been announced during today’s Warhammer Skulls event! The sequel to the 2023 Doom-inspired Warhammer 40k shooter, it’s set for a 2026 release with the bloody and bombastic return of the absurdly strong Malum Caedo.

Published by Big Fan, a Devolver Digital label, the game is bringing a whole new story that follows on from the original Boltgun. In addition, new enemies and weapons will be waiting for all your running-and-gunning needs. Notably, Khorne Daemons are featured prominantly in the new trailer, including Bloodletters and Juggernauts, which promise to be incredibly ferocious melee fighters.

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You can watch the trailer yourself below, where you can see Caedo explore never-before seen locations in the Warhammer 40K universe. He had previously found himself fighting in the original Warhammer 40K Space Marine setting, some time after the events of that cult classic, but it looks like Caedo and Auroch Digital have been given some free reign to explore entirely new adventures.

In case you haven’t played the original Boltgun, it’s a fantastic send-up to Retro FPS games with a lovingly created Warhammer 40K coat of paint on it. As part of the Warhammer Skulls event, plenty of games are getting substantial discounts Boltgun included. You can grab it now with a 47% price cut.

Are you excited for Boltgun 2? Let us know below!

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May 24, 2025 0 comments