If you’ve been involved in any part of the trading world for XRP over the last few months, you will have seen the term “origin cycle theory” scrawled across a chart with lines connecting waves and waves labelled. It seems technical, perhaps even official, it’s part of the XRP code. It isn’t. Rather than memorizing price targets that come with the XRP origin cycle theory, it would be more beneficial to know where they are coming from, how they’re created, and why so many people disagree.
This guide reveals the truth behind the theory, the actual history behind the term “origin”, the mathematics involved with the two major price structures analysts point to, why it gets criticism from the market study crowd who make their living studying the market, and what would it logically require for the bull market to be fulfilled or for it to collapse. None of this is investment advice. It’s a try to provide you with the complete picture that is not always conveyed in short news pieces that cover this topic.
The Truth behind the XRP Origin Cycle Theory
This term has gained traction since a market commentator, going by the name Cobb, created a long-term chart of XRP’s price action, dividing it into two large five-wave formations, which extend back to the initial time that XRP began trading. The “origin” part of the name is the main reason it stands out from the dozens of shorter-term Elliott Wave counts that are churned out weekly on crypto Twitter and TradingView: The theory bases every wave count on the first price data for XRP, and not on a recent low point or a single bull cycle.
The core claim is straightforward even if the chart looks complicated. Under this scenario, XRP’s price action since trading has been in two massive five wave patterns, exactly like the classic Elliott Wave pattern, where three impulsive waves (1, 3, and 5) are followed by two corrective moves (2 and 4). The first sequence covers the trading history of the cryptocurrency, XRP, from its early days all through the 2017 Bull run. In this account, the second sequence started almost right away and is ongoing now, where supporters contend that XRP is in the fifth and final wave of that second structure.
There are a few other versions of this exercise run by members of the XRP community that are very similar and it is important to know this before you settle on one as a standard, agreed upon model. Each of these has been posting similar wave counts and price projections for XRP at various times: EGRAG, CryptoInsightUK, Mr. Xoom, James Crypto, Casi, and XForceGlobal. The current prevailing theory of the origin is the one that repeats waves, and that is a much larger genre in which the theory of origin is embedded.
Vocabulary you must have: Impulse waves, Corrective waves, Fibonacci levels
To get started, it’s important to establish a few terms that frequently appear in any mention of the origin cycle theory. A lot of the confusion regarding the origin cycle theory is due to people nodding their heads at terms such as “impulse” and “Fibonacci extension” without ever being properly defined.
An impulse wave is a move in the direction of the larger trend. According to Elliott, these are the odd numbered waves: wave 1, wave 3 and wave 5. These are the legs that move, the legs that are the focus of analysts, and the legs that give you the big percentage gains you’ll see in the wave-by-wave breakdown later in this article. A corrective wave will run against that movement and will reverse the price before the next impulse leg is created. Wave 2 and wave 4 are part of a five-wave sequence and when the trend finally turns, when it is at a bigger timeframe, it tends to move in its own three-part pattern, which can be noted as A, B and C.
There is a small group of rules ostensibly hard to break when using Elliott Wave theory to distinguish between a good wave count and one drawn anywhere. Wave 2 should not make a move back in the direction of wave 1 more than 100% of the distance traveled by wave 1. The shortest of the three impulse waves is not wave 3, it is usually the longest. And a move back into the price territory of wave 1 is not supposed to occur in wave 4. These rules theoretically provide meat on the bones to the method. In reality, even seasoned Elliott Wave traders admit that real markets are often found to violate these boundaries, as well as obscure them, hence the multitude of counts that can be defended on the same chart.
There are also the Fibonacci numbers, a series in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, which appear everywhere in nature, and which are present in market psychology too, according to Elliott Waveers. This sequence is used to come up with specific ratios traders can use to gauge how far a correction will go and how far an impulse wave will reach. The 38.2 percent, 50 percent and 61.8 percent are the three most popular retracement levels, which are used to make a guess as to where a wave 2 or wave 4 pullback may find support. In the extension arena, ratios such as 100 percent, 127.2 percent, and 161.8 percent are used to forecast the extent to which a subsequent wave 3 or wave 5 will rise above the previous wave. These numbers, such as $17.50 or $9 to $10, are typically coming from one of these Fibonacci calculations, even if the article that references the number does not explain where they are from.
Another one that is important to understand is wave degree. Elliott’s initial concept was that this five-wave, three-wave pattern occurs at every time frame, from a five-minute chart up to a multi-decade chart, and each higher time frame incorporates smaller time frames of the same wave pattern. The idea of the origin cycle theory is the same as the one mentioned but pushed to the extreme. Rather than one bull run or one year of price action, it views the entire history of XRP’s trading life, spanning more than 10 years, as one of the biggest cycles to ever happen, which can sometimes be called a supercycle. It’s an ambitious and very long term claim, and it’s important to keep this scale in mind when people put numbers on it.
Who is Cobb and why should the source of a theory like this matter?
He’s a handle-based trader and commentator on the marketplace who has been featured often in crypto information outlets, and his name is most frequently cited by the origin cycle theory. That’s something that you should take a moment to think about, as it’s a much different way to source some other well-known wave theories in crypto.
Vendors should make comparisons with a couple of the more well-known players that are performing a similar role in the industry. Peter Brandt is a commodities trader and crypto trader who has been in the game for decades, and has a long track record of trading that is well known to the public, and uses Elliott Wave and classic chart patterns. Benjamin Cowen has an engineering background, and his “Into the Cryptoverse” platform combines statistical modeling with longer-term wave and cycle analysis and has a long public archive of past calls that anyone can refer to. In fact, services such as ElliottWaveTrader have been around for more than 10 years and have a real subscriber base that reviews performance on a real-time basis. But none of that means these analysts are right more often than they’re wrong and none of that means they have a body of dated work on which to build a reputation that a skeptical reader can go review, but it does mean that there is a body of dated work on which they can build their reputation.
Not that same trail is available for a pseudonymous social media commentator. No one has ever been able to organize a scroll through the past and look back at previous calls, no compliance history has been preserved, there is no professional credential behind the name, and, of course, it’s often hard to tell whether earlier predictions that used the same handle came true or simply faded away after failing. That is not a knock on the person personally. For a crypto wave count, it’s just a fact of life that any charting account with a following can make a confident-sounding wave count and for it to be picked up by a wave count site, the chart needs to look interesting and the claim needs to be dramatic enough to get clicks.
This is important because of the amount of emphasis you are placing on the number associated with the origin cycle theory. But it doesn’t mean there’s no risk of the analysis being inaccurate, and there are many anonymous or pseudonymous traders with years of screen time who have some pretty good instincts. But it does imply that you’re considering a viewpoint from a stranger that you can’t prove from an independent source, and that you’re looking at it from within a genre, Elliott Wave forecasting, that even the most respected practitioners acknowledge is based on subjective interpretation and can be revised at any time. The context in which to read the theory is better when it is set in this context than if it is assumed that Cobb is a known institutional research desk with his reputation hanging in the balance.
The Origin Story, the theory is named after
This is because the keyword that they are searching contains the word “origin” and cycle theory, so it would be appropriate to talk a bit about what actually happened to XRP.
XRP’s roots date back to 2011 when its founders, David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb, started to develop a new alternative to Bitcoin that wouldn’t rely on energy-intensive mining. It was McCaleb, who is a former founder of the early Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, and Arthur Britto, who created the ICONIC platform, who together created what became the XRP ledger. They adopted the name and concept of “Ripple” from an earlier idea to use peer-to-peer payments, which was conceived by Ryan Fugger in 2004 and blessed by him, and incorporated it into their new project.
In June 2012, the XRP Ledger was launched and 100 billion tokens were created at the time, instead of being discovered over the course of time like with Bitcoin. This is one of the most critical structural properties of XRP and one that the origin cycle theory doesn’t really discuss: No schedule of supply shock, no halving event, no element of XRP’s monetary policy which will mechanically produce repeating four-year cycles like bitcoin’s. If there is any cyclicality in the price of XRP, it cannot be in its supply mechanics.
Almost as soon as the ledger was launched, Chris Larsen joined the founding group and, with him, they founded a company that was initially called NewCoin, later OpenCoin and finally Ripple Labs. The founders gave 80 billion of the 100 billion XRP to this new company to develop and promote adoption of the currency, while retaining 20 billion for themselves. That allocation of 80-billion tokens is important in the context of the supply story since the end of 2017, Ripple has held the majority of its tokens in a cryptographically secure escrow system that doles out up to one billion tokens each month in fixed intervals. Any leftover tokens are put back for the next release. It isn’t a halving, it isn’t a price cycle trigger, that’s what some readers think of when they hear the word “cycle,” it’s a steady, predictable supply drip. That same distribution of almost all of the token supply between three founders and a single company at launch is also why XRP continues to be viewed as a single topic of an ongoing debate about the decentralization of its own ledger, which we explore in full in our XRP Ledger decentralization debate.
XRP began public trading in August 2013, coinciding very well with the beginning of the wave count of the origin cycle theory. Over the next several years, the company behind XRP changed its name a number of times: OpenCoin to Ripple Labs in 2013, then to Ripple by 2015, and later to the rival project Stellar by McCaleb in 2013. Chris Larsen resigned as CEO in 2016 and passed the torch to Brad Garlinghouse, who guided the company through the biggest chapter in its history, a 5-year legal fight with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
That case, which was filed in December 2020, contended that Ripple’s institutional sales of XRP were a securities offering without registration. After years of waiting, including summary judgment rulings, appeals, and a change in SEC leadership, both parties have now withdrawn their appeals from the case in August 2025. A federal court ruled that XRP’s direct institutional sales violated securities registration laws, but sales to retail buyers in public exchanges didn’t qualify as securities sales, and the penalties were $125 million. That distinction provided the industry with the clarity it has been seeking for years and took away a massive cause for hesitation for numerous U.S. exchanges and fund managers investing in XRP. Over the next few months, spot XRP ETFs started rolling out, attracting more than a billion dollars in total inflows by mid-2026.
How can all this be relevant for a theory that is based solely on chart patterns? It’s noteworthy that the price moves that the origin cycle theory calls “waves” match up closely with actual events, such as banking collaborations, regulations, lawsuits and Bitcoin’s own boom-and-bust cycles caused by the halving. A chart pattern that breaks out just as a 5-year court situation is coming to an end and a series of major catalysts unfold is not exactly the same as a pattern that simply repeats, unrelated to news. The most useful filter you can apply in any cycle theory in crypto is to keep in mind this distinction.
Walking through the first five-wave structure, 2013 to 2017
To get an idea of what the theory is actually pointing at, it’s helpful to follow the price action used to define the theory, as the numbers express a more interesting story than the labels do.
The first wave of the original structure is usually the time period when XRP moved from approximately $0.0067 in October 2013 to approximately $0.061 in December 2013, a surge of over 800 percent in a mere couple of months. By today’s standards, the dollar amounts were small, but by that time, a token had only been trading for a few months, so this was an extraordinary move.
What followed was a brutal correction. By July of 2014, XRP had regained nearly all of that value and was back up to about $0.0028, off by more than 95 percent from its December 2013 high. In wave-counting terms, this is wave 2, the first BIG Corrective Leg. By December 2014, this low price point was followed by another quick XRP rise, with the currency now trading near $0.028 thanks to its climb of approximately 896 percent. Notably, this rally was not the strongest rally of the Elliott Wave sequence, which is a standard feature of an Elliott Wave count: the 3rd rally is supposed to be the strongest rally of the sequence, although not necessarily a new all time high in absolute terms, compared to the 1st rally.
A fourth wave then reversed the trend, bringing the price back to a higher bottom around $0.0053, after which the fifth wave of this structure pushed XRP into a new all-time high at about $0.40 in May 2017. That in and of itself is the end of the first big arc in this framework, and the total of almost four years of price action is a five wave arc.
These numbers are quite small and worth pondering. The first “supercycle” of this theory was done below 40 cents. It’s the second structure that makes the theory so emotional today, with the dollar values becoming quite a bit more dramatic.
The second structure: 2018 through the present cycle
Within the same framework, a new five wave structure began as soon as the first one ended, with wave 1 of the new structure reaching XRP to a high of approximately $3.30 to $3.84 in January 2018 using the pricing of different exchanges. The spread does tell a little bit about the chaos and the lack of proper tracking of crypto pricing in early 2018, and the fact that even the “hard data” on these wave counts can be quite imprecise.
Since that January 2018 high, XRP has been a long grind down on the bear market side, settling near its current low of $0.114 in March 2020, just around the beginning of the global market panic associated with the early days of the pandemic. This drop, known as wave 2 of the second structure, was more than two years long and erased more than 95 percent of the previous high.
The second structure saw a similar pattern to the first, with XRP rallying to $1.96 by April 2021, but not reaching the 2018 high during Wave 3. XRP bounced from that peak, then drifted and corrected in succeeding years in the midst of the continuous court battles with the SEC, selling off on bad news and rallying on positive legal headlines, eventually dropping back down to around $0.50 by November 2024. This whole multi-year cycle is called wave 4 by analysts following this approach.
The fifth, and most likely last, wave of this structure is what gives rise to the current excitement of the theory. Its origins can be traced back to the approximate time of Donald Trump’s election victory in the U.S. in November 2016, when XRP, along with many other cryptocurrencies, rallied on increased optimism about the regulatory climate. After the wave-4 low near $0.50, XRP surged in late 2024 and during 2025 till it eventually surpassed the previous 2018 high to form a cycle peak around $3.66 in July 2025. That pullback above the 7-year-old resistance level was significant evidence to those who believe in the origin cycle theory that there was a real and active wave 5, and not another fake attempt to make a new high.
From there, the published charts of where this wave 5 may end up differ greatly from one source to another, which brings us to the part of this story that most short blurbs simply skim over.
Why are the price targets all over the map?
This’s where a truly helpful gap analysis is important, as nearly every short article on this subject will include one analyst’s “take” as fact. It is not. The variety of XRP-related forecasts in the past couple of years is immense when aligned.
According to Cobb’s own theory, the cost of an origin cycle is between approximately $12.50 and $25.50, with $17.50 being a good ballpark figure. At the same time, another analyst, EGRAG, had made a separate prediction that XRP has the potential to rise to approximately $17 if the crypto market as a whole were to approach $5 trillion in total market value and XRP’s market share could be restored to around 20 percent, which is a dominance-based approach rather than a wave count. In another study of EGRAG directly based on Elliott Wave and Fibonacci extensions, the cited range was $6.75 to $18.25, while in another study, a target band of $9-$10, with a stretch case to $27. With a different wave count on the same chart, Mr. Xoom pointed to a less extreme $7-$10 zone for the end of wave 5. Few experts explained two different wave patterns that had been seen in the more recent price action of XRP, with one wave set to end between $12 and $14.50, and the other up to $42 at a future point in time. Looking back even more, a late December 2023 analyst named James Crypto said he was expecting a wave 5 to arrive sometime in March or April 2024 with a price range of $5-$13.
The latter one is worth dwelling on because it provides a true and verifiable measure of the accuracy of these predictions in the past. XRP did not reach $5 to $13 in early 2024. It traded anywhere between $0.40 and $0.70 for much of that year, only seeing any meaningful increase in price after the November 2024 election, which came well after the anticipated timeframe and at a fraction of the anticipated price. Not everything in a wave count is worthless, and it’s a clear, documented case of a confident, specific, chart-based prediction falling off its target by a large margin, and it’s the sort of accountability check that isn’t mentioned much in most coverage of these theories.
Stitched together, you have published targets from $6 to $42 for the same general “wave 5” idea based on the same general chart by varying analysts on the same price data. That is not a minor rounding difference. It’s a testament to the huge range of individual interpretation that is possible when using the underlying method, something that has been pointed out by technical analysts since Elliott Wave theory was developed decades ago.
All this is based on the Elliott Wave theory
It is important to have an understanding of the tool on which the origin cycle theory is built to be able to fairly evaluate it. Elliott wave theory was created by an accountant and author by the name of Ralph Nelson Elliott, and he wrote these ideas about the theory in a book called “The Wave Principle” in 1938. On the surface, financial markets appear to be random, but they actually behave in repeatable cycles, said Elliott, that are a manifestation of investor psychology, namely a wave of optimism leading to peaks, corrections and then larger waves of optimism, which repeat on a larger scale on an hourly chart as well as a decade-long chart.
The basic structure consists of five waves in the direction of the larger trend, labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, followed by three corrective waves (usually called A, B and C) where the trend changes. In that framework, Fibonacci ratios are the ratios that are used to determine the extent of a countertrend or the extent of an impulsive wave. Wave 2 tends to repeat a significant length of wave 1, wave 4 a smaller length of wave 3 and wave 3 is typically the longest and strongest of the entire sequence. This is exactly the structure that the XRP origin cycle theory takes, and it extends it in a vast time frame, thereby using the entire trading history of XRP as one giant Elliott Wave chart.
The Elliott framework enjoys a quite devoted following from both professional and retail traders, and many people who earn a living in finance through technical analysis have commented positively on it throughout the years. Not an out-of-the-box concept created for crypto. It is over seventy years older than Bitcoin and has been used for generations with stock indices, currencies and commodities.
Why do so many analysts push back on this kind of theory
Those same flaws are the reasons Elliott Wave has been one of the most soundly and most harshly criticized theories in technical analysis, and those criticisms are no less applicable to any cycle theory that sits on top of Elliott Wave theory, including the one employed with XRP.
Subjectivity is the major problem that is brought up time and time again. This is what we saw with the price targets for XRP, as two analysts viewing the same price chart come to different conclusions, such as two different wave counts, or waves that look like 3 when one analyst considers it a 5, and vice versa. Wave counts can be broken up into sub-waves and the corrections can have a multitude of forms, so almost always something can be made to fit, after the fact, the current price action.
That leads to a second, related criticism: hindsight bias. Backward looking at a chart and labeling 5 waves that have actually occurred is much easier than correctly identifying wave 3 as it is happening in real time. In other words, said mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the approach relies more on the judgment of the chartist than on repeatable evidence, and according to mathematician David Aronson, Elliott Wave resembles more of a compelling story that can be shoelaced onto virtually any slice of market history.
But there’s also the matter of falsifiability. Theories are best when they make predictions that are easily testable, which means they can be shown to be incorrect. That Elliott Wave counts are flexible means that if a forecast is missed, like the James Crypto $5-to-$13 forecast, it’s possible to just recount the waves and come up with another equally confident set without taking a failure as a sign that it failed. It is the theory’s major shortcoming, critics say, because it is very good at explaining the past, and not very good at setting bounds on the future in a testable fashion.
None of this means that the folks using these counts to talk about XRP are being malicious. Many are posting their sincere thoughts and making their reasoning public, though with disclaimers. However, it is not as strong as it seems when phrased as a prediction with a statistically sound level of belief behind it.
Is XRP really having cycles or does it appear that way?
Apart from the debate of counting waves, there is a separate, more solid question that should be asked: Does XRP really have a cyclical pattern, and if it does, where does it originate?
The truth is that XRP’s major price moves seem to be influenced even more by external catalysts than any calendar-based factor. Unlike Bitcoin, XRP does not incorporate a halving event into its design, as it was mined in one go in 2012 and 100 billion tokens were released. Unlike Bitcoin, which has experienced four well-documented years of monthly releases that are apparently unpredictable and large in magnitude, the releases that Ripple will make every month to cover for its own massive holdings are small and predictable.
What XRP does, reasonably consistently, is go on a buying spree when one of a few specific things happens: a Bitcoin bull market brings in capital for the segment of the crypto space, a significant bank or payments partnership makes headlines, a regulatory development brings about some clarity. In 2017, the run coincided with the wider first wave of mainstream crypto mania and a wave of bank partnership announcements. The rally came in 2021, when the stock market was on a record bull run, despite the SEC lawsuit. The timing of the move from the end of 2024 to mid-2025 coincided with the U.S. election result, the resolution of the SEC case, and the introduction of spot XRP ETFs. Even the Bitcoin halving cycle has an indirect impact here: Altcoins like XRP have shown a tendency to rally most over the last year or so after the Bitcoin halving. As the Bitcoin halving cycle enters the second half of its cycle, new liquidity has been pushed from BTC to smaller cap tokens. There’s a small but telling sign that a lot of XRP price action is narrative-based, as even unverified rumors can move the needle, in this case, the persistent speculation about XRP and Elon Musk consistently generated short-term buying momentum throughout the last few years without any concrete evidence of their connection.
In other words, there’s likely something cyclical about XRP’s price history, but it looks a lot more like XRP tends to rally when Bitcoin is in an up-cycle when regulatory or partnership news is good, and it tends to crash hard when risk appetite dries up as a whole” than it looks like “XRP follows a fixed, self-contained five-wave pattern that will repeat on schedule regardless of outside influences.” In retrospect, the chart of the origin cycle theory is a fair representation of the form of that history. It is a stronger statement to make if it can promise you what will come next.
How is this part of the larger picture in the crypto market cycles
XRP’s wave theory concept is actually a specific, limited version of a far more extensive pattern that’s commonplace in crypto markets: searching for repeating charts in price history, just so it doesn’t seem so random.
The best-known version of this theory in crypto is the Bitcoin halving cycle, which has seen Bitcoin’s programmed supply of half as many blocks each four years followed by a rally in the price of Bitcoin spanning a few months, followed by a wider market top, followed by a long pull, and followed by a halving resetting the clock. This sentiment and liquidity effect of Bitcoin can be seen in altcoins such as XRP, as it takes the same four-year cycle that it has without having one itself. To make multi-year forecasts, some of the newer price prediction models for XRP explicitly assume halving cycles, despite the fact that XRP’s own supply schedule doesn’t have a cycle of halving.
However, traders also rely on cycles that extend beyond halving cycles, such as dominance cycles, which are predictable trends in the movement of capital between Bitcoin and altcoins, and on cycles that span the entire market, following the collective emotions of the trading community from disbelief to euphoria and then to capitulation. These patterns are more or less empirically based, and wave-based theories, such as the origin cycle theory, can be seen as one more layer over these patterns, without being a stand-alone phenomenon for the XRP.
Do Bitcoin or Ethereum have something similar to this theory?
Yes, and the fact that wave theory is applied to Bitcoin and Ethereum gives you a clue as to why the XRP version is the way it is.
Bitcoin, in general, is considered the purest asset in crypto for this type of analysis. It trades all the time, 24 hours a day, there’s no exchange closure or circuit breaker and it’s the most liquid of all the asset classes and also has the longest price history of any big cryptocurrency. Some long-term Bitcoin analysts see this behavior and model the entire Bitcoin price cycle from its earliest trading days to the most recent ATH levels as one multi-degree impulse structure, with each 4-year halving-induced boom and bust as a higher degree wave. That’s the same thing the origin cycle theory does with XRP: they’re saying that you start the cycle from the beginning of all the trading data from that asset instead of a single cycle. One thing that XRP doesn’t have is a real, mechanical reason behind cycles repeating every 4 years or so, which is why Bitcoin’s wave 3 impulses seem to align themselves so well with the starting point of each and every Bitcoin halving rally.
It is the same for Ethereum, and it is often said that it is following Bitcoin’s footsteps while getting sharper corrections between impulse waves, sometimes even plotting the wave structure based on the ratio of ETH to Bitcoin, instead of the USD. Smaller, younger assets such as Solana also receive wave counts, although fewer, as analysts point out that there are fewer full cycles available to compare to for the newer assets, which means that a long-time wave count is less reliable the more recent the asset.
XRP is in a sweet middle ground here, and in saying so, I should be explicit about one aspect that is not covered by most of the cryptocurrency coverage: the wave count specialists I know specifically say that the practice is a little more difficult with XRP. The years of SEC litigation have resulted in sudden, news-induced price surges that are not the same as the natural market psychology upon which Elliott Wave relies, the kind of price surge or collapse that can cause a price wave to bend or break, and throw the fractal-looking pattern off its course. XRP has been in the market for unusually long periods on the side when the market trended, making a clean 5-wave count difficult to reasonably back with conviction. That’s important to keep in mind, as even in the Elliott Wave community itself, XRP is a harder chart to count than Bitcoin and not easier.
Also, it has an interesting piece of history, as it goes the other direction and doesn’t simply dismiss this section, but keeps it honest. Just as Bitcoin was nearing its all-time high price and the peak of its euphoric moment, in January 2018, one anonymous Bitcoin forum user published a comprehensive Elliott Wave count suggesting that Bitcoin had completed the five-wave bull run and that the price would soon drop into the $2,000 to $4,000 range. At the time, virtually everyone ignored it. Bitcoin did just that the next year. Wave theory has already made truly ahead-of-time predictions in the past, and in the case of Bitcoin. It’s also given people enough confidence to miss, with the one on XRP mentioned previously in this piece being a case in point. That’s right, and a fair-minded reader should accommodate both of these, not choose the one that fits the narrative he or she wishes to subscribe to.
The wave count’s implications for 2026, 2027, and future years
First of all, it’s important to distinguish between two different types of forecasts that are frequently used in the same headlines when making predictions about XRP: wave-theory-based targets, such as those from the origin cycle theory, and regular algorithmic or trend-based price-prediction models provided by data and analytics platforms. They take vastly different approaches, and they are now aiming at different worlds, as of mid-2026.
The wave theory side of the theory is deliberately open-ended, as is Cobb’s treatment of the origin cycle theory. The published range of about $12.50 to $25.50 is not tied to any particular year or quarter but the theory is that wave 5 is underway and that wave 5 has more to go once broader market conditions improve – but when is not so certain. That timing question can be a big one Our separate analysis provides a useful illustration of how the timing question can tip the scales differently: using one wave structure, the analysis suggests a wave 5 conclusion in the range of $12 to $14.5 in the current multi-year cycle, while using an alternate wave structure, based on a different starting point, the same general method points to a wave 5 target in the range of $42 and explicitly states that this conclusion will occur “years later,” in a next cycle, not this one. Just the same toolset, the same asset, but two vastly different timelines, two completely different prices. It all depends on the starting point and what structure the analyst is anchored to, respectively.
Compare that to the more moderate and model-based price forecasting that was going around during the same timeframe. Predictive algorithmic websites that rely on moving averages, momentum indicators, and historical volatility to forecast XRP numbers have generally forecast a much more limited trading range for the year 2026, with some popular forecasts around the $1.40 to $1.65 range around the year-end of 2026, and others closer to $1.10 to $1.90. More distant predictions, up to 2030, have in general converged to a $1.40 to $1.90 range, which is a small fraction of the long-term targets suggested by the theories based on the wave.
The important contextual number in this whole discussion is the single digits to low double digits/around a dollar and a half. It’s not a matter of how one is right and the other is wrong. It’s that the two legitimate, widely used forecasting methods can be off by an order of magnitude, applied to the same asset over the same period of time, and most readers only see one of those pictures at a time. Before deciding on either story, it is important to understand that they both exist if you are looking to make a real-world prediction about where XRP might be in the year 2026, 2027, or 2030.
Where XRP stands relative to the theory right now
XRP’s trading range is currently in the $1.05-$1.15 range as of late June 2026, a significant decline from the trendy price levels observed during the wave 5 bull run in July 2025 near $3.66 and significantly below the average targets linked to the bull run scenario. The price has been under pressure despite the monthly releases of escrow holdings and the absence of strong short-term inflows due to widespread crypto market sell-offs in early and mid-2026, as well as a gradual consolidation of whale wallet holdings and robust inflows into ETFs. During this time, another major factor is taking center stage: the U.S. regulatory framework for digital assets is gaining momentum through the Senate as the CLARITY Act.
The bullish wave 5 scenario is a compelling story, but if you were trying to apply the theory as a viable time frame rather than a fun-to-tell tale, then the realistic view of the current situation is what would need to occur in order for the bullish wave 5 scenario to stay intact, and what would argue that it has broken. Those who believe in the theory would expect to see the overall uptrend since the election of 2024 stay above the wave 4 low, which now seems to be around $0.50, if you are to believe the theory that wave 5 is still forming. They would also want the strength again when the general market conditions are improving, as the theory clearly points to a pullback within wave 5, not its end. On the contrary, a prolonged slide breaking significantly below the recent multi-month support levels, particularly during the Bitcoin and the overall market’s recovery, would be the type of divergence that tends to bring wave-count analysts back to the drawing board, and one of the patterns that critics cite when they say this sort of analysis is hard to disprove.
A Reasonable way to use a theory like this
None of the above is a “no cycle theories” message or a “no people building them” message. Long-term chart patterns can be a very useful tool to help you think about a historical context for an asset’s price changes, to remind you of how severe the price swings have been between euphoric rallies and desperate declines, and to keep in mind that the price of an asset running up on a major rally has been known to correct violently after the event. That historical context has real value.
Where it gets dangerous is treating a specific number, $17.50, or $27, or $42, as pretty much a sure thing, sizing a position based on that number, or not giving weight to obvious red flags because “the wave count still works. A more sensible way of thinking about such theories is as one of many inputs, as a way of imagining possible scenarios, not a prediction to be wagered on like the farm. It is also worth noting that the authors of these forecasts are peddling opinions in the open, and in many cases, it is explicitly stated that these forecasts are based on information and not financial advice, and that previous such forecasts in this exact fashion and containing as much explicit information and as many dates have been far off the mark.
When you’re seriously considering XRP, the more enduring indicators have a tendency to be the fundamental ones: the rate of real institutional adoption on the XRP Ledger, the trajectory of U.S. and international regulatory developments, the state of Ripple’s real payments business, ETF flow data, and the overall state of the crypto market and macro liquidity environment. That picture may be accompanied by context information, such as wave counts. They should not be used in place of it.
What Ripple’s IPO plans entail and how they would really impact the next wave
There’s a common sentiment in the bullish XRP community that when Ripple goes public, there’ll be some sort of windfall or special treatment for XRP holders, and that will push the price further up the XRP theory’s higher levels. Things are a lot more modest and a lot more conditional than that narrative implies, as of mid-2026.
Ripple’s leadership has been unwavering and candid in its lack of interest in going public. President Monica Long has consistently denied that there is any timeline or plans for an IPO for Ripple, and the company’s private market valuation is robust after it reportedly secured investment in a round that saw it valued at $40 billion in November 2025. In public statements at industry gatherings, CEO Brad Garlinghouse has cited the underwhelming performance of other recently public crypto firms as a factor in why Ripple thinks it has more upside to remain private, with greater flexibility in operating and less disclosure.
What changed the conversation in 2026 was a single hedged comment. When asked outright on a podcast if there would be a benefit for XRP holders if Ripple ever went public, Garlinghouse did not exclude it as a possibility, saying something like “maybe” but making it clear that the plan was not near-term and was not planned. The comment went viral on XRP social media, as if it meant that a payout to holders was imminent, but the reality was just the possibility in response to a question, not a structure, size, or date for anything concrete.
Here, some precision is essential, as this is a crucial point for any cycle theory. Ripple is a private company and XRP is a public token that is a separate entity. If you’re holding XRP, you don’t have equity, dividend rights, or a stake in any of Ripple’s profits, just as if you own shares in a supplier, you don’t own a stake in one of the company’s customers. As they stand, there is no guarantee that Ripple will ever go public, and it seems the most probable scenario is that any value generated by Ripple is distributed to the actual shareholders and employees, and early investors, rather than to the tens of billions of XRP tokens in public circulation. Another, not so widely reported, negative effect is that an IPO could attract institutional investors and capital to Ripple stock, giving public investors the disclosures, accountability, and potential rewards that they seek, but not the underlying token.
All of that said, indirect effects like higher institutional trust, wider adoption of XRP payment products, and greater visibility could never mean that a Ripple IPO won’t be relevant to XRP. However, assuming it is going to be a tangible, timetabled change that will drive the second half of wave 5 is ahead of where Ripple’s own management is really going. It’s the speculation on top of the speculation and those hoping for this particular storyline should be aware of how thin the underlying facts are.
You can check the XRP wave count live by yourself on this page
When it comes to following origins over time, and a summary of the origin cycle theory and its many variants, that will help to know where this kind of analysis lives, if you don’t just want to follow the edited version that comes up in a headline.
The majority of Elliott Wave commentary about XRP is published and updated straight on charting platforms, and TradingView is the platform used the most. There, they usually will find dozens of wave counts being published independently at any moment, as price action happens, which is much more up-to-date and far more varied than any one news article which repeats one analyst’s chart from weeks back. Many of the same analysts have threads on social sites like X, and they tend to elaborate on their counts with more conversational arguments than what gets the clean cut on the aggregator sites.
If someone mentions a high, a low, or the current price for a wave, you should check the price and the volume on Crypstudio for the real price and volume data to see if the cited price is a high, a low or the current price. This is important because the prices may differ slightly from one exchange to another and sometimes an analyst’s chosen data source can help explain why two seemingly contradictory wave counts exist.
If you do finally locate a live wave count to follow, there are a few habits that differentiate the true from the noise. Be specific in looking for an invalidation level: The price point that the analyst would say would invalidate his current count, the price point that proves he is wrong, and if he doesn’t say it there, then you’re left with almost nothing to go on. Look to see if a source recently changed the count on their own, but did not notify you, as it happens a lot and you should know about it before you go by it. Don’t use just one chart or one count of any sort, show two or three different counts, side by side, on the same asset and timeframe, where they are in agreement, and where they are in sharp disagreement, which tells you more about the actual level of uncertainty than any one confident-sounding chart ever will. Used in this way, it is not so much finding the right prediction as gauging the variance of the informed opinion that is out there, which is a useful input in addition to the fundamental and regulatory developments that were covered earlier in this piece.
Common mix-ups that confuse the whole conversation
Much of the confusion surrounding XRP cycle theories, including the origin cycle theory, is the same hype that affects each chart and each headline mentioning this topic.
The first is the halving myth. Given that Bitcoin’s four year cycle is so entwined with its halving schedule, anyone who sees a cycle theory on XRP’s chart tends to assume that XRP must have something similar embedded in its 4-year cycle as well. It does not. The 100 billion XRP tokens that will ever be produced in the original supply were produced in 2012. No mining, no block reward, and no block halving. There’s one continuous supply-side mechanism, and it’s Ripple’s escrow system, which dumps up to a billion XRP per month on the schedule that’s publicly known, which is not that hard to predict, but is far from shocking.
The second error is considering Ripple and XRP as synonymous. Ripple is a private fintech firm that’s been acquiring a ton of payments, stablecoin and prime brokerage assets and developing payment and liquidity products, including those using XRP. XRP is a digital asset that is independent of Ripple the company, is available on the open permissionless XRP Ledger and can be transferred, stored and traded by anyone, regardless of the success or failure of Ripple the company, or its eventual public listing. Many of the XRP origin types of material mix them together, making it difficult to clearly assess either one. Ripple’s business activity and XRP’s price on the market, in addition, are separate tales, and the SEC case proved as much with its separate treatment of Ripple’s institutional XRP sales from the trading on open exchanges of XRP.
The third error is mixing the different analyst theories, assuming that they all agree on the same wave. The theory of the origins of XRP, which is associated with the name of Cobb, is only one particular way of counting its history. There are other widely used frameworks that count the waves differently, begin at different anchor points, and end at price targets that have no correlation whatsoever. If a headline states the wave theory points to $17, then what is the wave theory, the count and the time frame?
The Bottom Line
The XRP origin cycle is an Elliott Wave pattern that is a long-term analysis model, which is based on the larger 5 waves and has mapped XRP’s entire trading life back since 2013. The second cycle is dubbed the XRP origin cycle and is said to be still in the midst of its trading phase right now, following a strong rally from late 2024 to mid-2025 and a subsequent pullback. It encapsulates a very real and dramatic part of XRP’s history, and its bull case is based on the notion that the breakout above XRP’s previous 2018 high in 2025 showed that there’s still a big enough wave 5 to play out toward the double digits.
Meanwhile it carries with it all the known shortcomings of Elliott Wave theory, such as the reliance on subjective interpretation, the tendency to post-it-up stories that have been written after the fact, wildly differing price targets based on the charts of different people, and at least one clear and easy example of a wave-based forecast of XRP that was off by a huge factor and had been in effect for a long time. There is no such thing as a built-in supply mechanism, such as Bitcoin’s halving, to provide a structural anchor for a cycle theory, and anything that does appear on the chart is more likely to be a reflection of outside catalysts, regulatory milestones, and cycles of liquidity stemming from Bitcoin than it is of a repeatable pattern within XRP.
As such, the theory explains an asset that is worthwhile watching in the history of blockchain, as well as gives an insight into the long-term perspective of a significant part of the XRP community. While it is not a crystal ball, and treating it as one, as many thinly reported articles on this subject do, is an affront to the actual history behind the name of XRP and to the actual uncertainty that is inherent in predicting any financial market years ahead.
This article is not intended to provide any kind of financial, investment or trading advice. The prices of cryptocurrencies can fluctuate rapidly, and the technical analysis indicators, such as Elliott Wave theory, are subjectively interpreted, and past price movements are not predictive of the future. When investing, always do your own research and you may want to consult a qualified financial professional for advice before investing.
