- XRP has dropped about 70% from its July 2025 peak of $3.65, now trading near $1.10 despite Ripple settling the SEC lawsuit and launching a stablecoin.
- Institutional demand remains muted as big funds wait for the CLARITY Act to pass, while spot XRP ETF inflows have stalled near $1.49 billion.
- Ripple releases 200–400 million new XRP each month with almost no burn mechanism, steadily increasing supply in a market with weak buying pressure.
- Whale accumulation of 70 million XRP and a Binance airdrop campaign offer short-term support, but technical indicators show a death cross and low trend strength.
XRP has been one of the most talked-about cryptocurrencies over the past year, yet its price tells a different story. After hitting a seven-year high of $3.65 in July 2025, the token has steadily declined and now trades around $1.10 — a drop of roughly 70%. This slide happened even as Ripple, the company behind XRP, settled its long-running lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, won a conditional trust bank charter, and grew its RLUSD stablecoin past $1.6 billion. So why isn’t the price going up?
The answer lies in a mix of macro headwinds, weak institutional demand, and a growing supply that keeps the token under pressure. While Ripple keeps scoring regulatory and business wins, the market has already priced many of them in, and new buyers haven’t stepped in to replace the traders who cashed out after the rally. Let’s break down what’s really happening with XRP.
XRP’s 70% Decline: A Year of Wins, Yet Price Keeps Falling
XRP’s peak in July 2025 came during a broader crypto bull run and growing confidence that Ripple would beat the SEC. When the settlement finally arrived in August, the price barely moved — because the rally had already priced in the legal victory. Then came spot XRP ETFs in November, the trust bank charter in December, and the SEC and CFTC classifying XRP as a commodity in March 2026. Each milestone should have boosted the price, but instead XRP kept sliding.
External factors played a big role. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran pushed oil prices higher and sent government bond yields climbing. When safe bonds pay well, investors pull money out of risky assets like crypto. Inflation stayed high, the Fed didn’t cut rates, and the entire crypto market felt the pressure. XRP, being a higher-beta asset, fell steeper than most — losing about 70% in just over a year.
Why Demand Remains Weak for XRP
For years, the main reason to own XRP was the lawsuit. People bought it as a bet that Ripple would win, and every legal twist moved the price. Once Ripple settled its legal battle with the SEC, that bet was over. Traders who piled in for the verdict took profits and moved on. The plan was for institutions to replace them, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Big institutions are waiting for the CLARITY Act — a bill that would write XRP’s commodity status into federal law. Until that passes, fund managers see the legal clarity as temporary and reversible. Spot XRP ETFs, which buy actual XRP, saw strong inflows at launch but have since stalled near $1.49 billion. Even Standard Chartered cut its year-end price target from $8.00 to $2.80 in February, citing poor performance.
XRP’s Growing Supply Caps the Price
Every month, Ripple unlocks 1 billion XRP from escrow. It relocks 60% to 80% of that, and the rest — about 200 to 400 million — reaches the market. That’s a small amount relative to daily trading volume, but the bigger issue is total supply. XRP is pre-mined, with all 100 billion tokens created at the start. About 62 billion are in circulation, and the rest are released on a fixed schedule over the next nine years.
Unlike Bitcoin, which has a shrinking supply and a built-in scarcity mechanism, XRP has almost no burn mechanism. A tiny fee is destroyed per transaction, totaling only about 14 million tokens in over a decade — negligible against 100 billion. So the amount of XRP available keeps growing, and without strong demand, that extra supply holds the price down.
Whale Accumulation and Binance Campaign Offer Some Support
Despite the bearish backdrop, there are signs of buying interest. Data from Santiment, shared by analyst Ali Martinez, shows that wallets holding between 1 million and 10 million XRP added 70 million tokens in one week, pushing their combined balance to nearly 3.83 billion. This accumulation coincided with improving sentiment — Santiment recorded 3.02 bullish social media comments for every bearish one, giving XRP the highest FOMO among tracked assets.
Binance also launched an $800,000 XRP airdrop campaign for users holding RLUSD, running from July 17 to August 14. The exchange will distribute XRP weekly to eligible users on Binance Earn, Margin, and Futures. This incentive aims to boost activity around Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin, which has seen its market cap slip from $1.81 billion to about $1.51 billion in recent weeks.
Technical Picture: XRP Stuck in a Tight Range
On the 4-hour chart, XRP is pressing against the upper boundary of a symmetrical triangle, with resistance near $1.12 and support around $1.06–$1.08. The Chaikin Money Flow reading of 0.26 indicates net buying pressure, but the Aroon indicator shows mixed signals — Aroon Up at 0% and Aroon Down at 57.14%. Daily indicators are similarly indecisive: the MACD histogram is slightly positive at 0.0053, while the RSI sits at a neutral 49.
The bigger picture is more concerning. XRP’s 50-day exponential moving average ($1.15) is well below the 200-day EMA ($1.45), forming a death cross — the most widely recognized bearish signal. The Average Directional Index (ADX) reads 13.3, well below the 25 threshold that confirms a trend, suggesting the market is directionless. Key support lies at $1.03 (Bollinger lower band), and a break below could open the door to $1.00 or lower. On the upside, a move above $1.13 would clear the nearest short-side liquidation levels, but sustained gains would require a catalyst like the CLARITY Act.
XRP’s price remains caught between weak demand and growing supply. While whale accumulation and exchange campaigns provide some short-term support, the token’s fate likely hinges on whether the CLARITY Act passes and brings institutional buyers back. Until then, the token is likely to keep drifting in a tight range, with the risk of another leg down if macro conditions worsen.
