At the start of August, XRP had notched 627 consecutive days of closing above $1, a feat that rebounded from a severe market-wide crash that lasted the best part of 2 years. Then on August 11 it broke. It fell to its lowest price since November 2024 at $0.9952, but rallied back to the $1.00 to $1.01 price range it’s currently in. The one-day event is not as important as the principle behind it: that a market which takes nearly two years to defend a psychological bottom is beginning to be worn down.
So here’s the context and more to the headline everybody is looking for at the moment: XRP price may be poised for a possible correction towards $1 as demand wanes, but there is more to it than this one broken support level. The inflows into spot ETFs have plunged by over 90% in just a few weeks. Ripple’s monthly escrow release continues to inflate a small number of wallets that have a large concentration of the float. And at the very same time, on-chain data shows large holders quietly buying more XRP than they have in months. The question on everyone’s mind with regards to the dollar is which of the forces will prevail.
Look at XRP price now, and you’ll see it within the same tight range it’s been in for days. Step back, and you’ll see that it’s not nearly so bad. In July 2025, during the previous major altcoin rally, XRP reached its all-time high price of $3.66, and it is currently over 70% below the ceiling. It has fallen more than 50 percent from its price of more than $2.40 in January. The volume has dried up, as has the price, and there isn’t much support from the broader market. Altcoin risk appetite has remained low across the board, with Bitcoin maintaining its stalemate in the $60,000s as it fails to break its own highs.
Why Demand for XRP Has Actually Been Drying Up
It’s evident in the exchange-traded fund data. The seven U.S. spot XRP ETFs have generated combined assets of approximately $1 billion, and cumulative inflows of nearly $1.5 billion since their launch, which is a significant accomplishment for a product line still in its infancy. However, the momentum has come to a halt. These funds reported the highest month of the year in May with approximately $132 million coming in. That had decreased to about $27 million by July. This was followed by the week ending Aug. 8, when net inflows only amounted to $1.01 million, a 93% reduction from the week before, which was $14.86 million. That day, August 7, the net flow was actually zero, which is to say, neither bitcoin nor ether’s ETF products saw a net change in any direction at any one point that week.
There is no rounding error. It is a fund complex that institutional allocators, for better or worse, have largely stopped putting money into at least for the time being even as they continued to pile into bitcoin and ether products during that same week.
The story with retail participation is messier. At the time, data from CryptoQuant revealed that the volume of transactions on the XRP Ledger dropped by 44% from 1.5 million to 3.4 million per day from the end of March to the beginning of April. Data from Glassnode in the middle of the summer indicated that the number of daily active addresses was approximately 20,000, the lowest in nearly a year. Both are trending in the same direction fewer were really moving XRP around.
But then, more recently, that picture was turned upside down, at least by some of the trackers. According to Santiment data referenced in mid-August, almost 50,000 active addresses were detected in a single day, marking the highest number of active addresses in over two months as the price continued to decline. On August 10, the number of users on the network surpassed 200,000 per day, according to a separate reading. While the price charts may be all ugly, network activity has been choppy and not always, and the difference in these numbers depends on what each platform considers an active wallet, and at the end of the day there’s no reason to believe it’s in freefall.
The derivatives market is less of a puzzle when it comes to the demand story. Meanwhile, the amount of open interest in XRP perpetual futures dropped from $2.96 billion to $2.51 billion in what amounted to a rocky week in June, indicating that leveraged positions were being reduced. Open interest is considered to be a true influx of capital when it rises alongside price. When it’s self-referencing, such as the $171 million swing that happened around the August CPI release, it’s likely more traders trying to play a macro event than anything else, not a genuine XRP conviction. Filter out that kind of noise, and there’s not as much spot demand as the price chart would make you believe.
Sentiment has been on a similar script. Social commentary on XRP fell to a three-month low in mid-August, coinciding with the token dropping back under $1, while the overall crypto Fear & Greed Index had periods of extreme fear throughout the year until it calmed down into more neutral readings recently.
The Supply Side of the Equation
The lack of demand is not the only half of the equation. XRP also has a structural supply overhang, which is not an issue for most large-cap tokens.
As detailed in December 2017, Ripple had 55 billion XRP locked up in an escrow system that was specially designed into the XRP Ledger’s underlying distributed ledger technology for monthly release up to 1 billion XRP. The mechanism is automatic in accordance with the ledger’s own consensus rules, no one at the company signs the mechanism. The net increase in the number of XRP in circulation is typically between 200M and 400M per month since Ripple re-locks the majority of each release into new escrow contracts.
The same held true for August’s release, with a catch. Ripple released the standard 1 billion tokens in three payments on August 1, and moved 700 million of the tokens directly back into escrow, meaning that only 300 million XRP were added, one of the smallest monthly increases ever. The circulating supply is currently about 62.5 billion tokens, with an additional 32+ billion tokens still under the lock for future circulation.
That’s a very disciplined schedule, and the market hasn’t really reacted to the unlock in August. However, there are consequences to being priced in. The market needs new demand to absorb these new tokens, and every month, hundreds of millions of new tokens come into existence but do not appear in the numbers of the ETF.
Ownership concentration makes the issue sharper. Over 220,000 wallets are currently holding XRP, with the top ten wallets holding more than 70% of the total XRP supply, and Binance holding more than 30% of the total XRP in circulation. When a few large holders get itchy, a market so focused can move either way, and that’s what has been happening, albeit not necessarily in the way that the ETF flow data alone would indicate.
The Whales Are Buying While Everyone Else Sells
The other important factor that distinguishes this correction from a capitulation is that retail traders and ETF buyers have been withdrawing, while large holders have been buying.
On-chain tools recorded over 72 million XRP going into large-holder wallets in one day immediately after the $1 drop on Aug. 11, with whale wallets adding more than 380 million XRP across the week. Supporting that, exchange flow data reveals that outflows from Binance XRP to private wallets, which are usually an indicator of potential long-term sitting on coins instead of selling, accounted for 91% of all exchange outflows during the time period, marking the highest level since 2024.
Well, that’s worth sitting with, as it contradicts the most simplistic narrative of demand reduction. Not everyone is losing their interest in XRP at the same time. The difference is that two separate groups of investors are moving in opposite directions at the same time, with retail investors and ETF allocators getting out and a smaller group of large, patient investors seeing the price under $1 as an opportunity instead of a red flag. Divergences like this have shown up around prior XRP bottoms, though they’ve never been a guarantee that a bottom is actually in. This is not the first time whales have been early, sometimes by months.
What the Charts Are Actually Saying
If you remove the story, simply focus on price action, and it looks bearish, not broken. XRP is currently below all the moving averages of significance: 50 EMA at ~$1.08-$1.09, 100 EMA near $1.17, and 200 EMA at ~$1.36. This stacked below everything is exactly what the technical traders read as a confirmed downtrend, and it is corroborated by the strong sell readings from most of the moving-average-based indicators on most charting platforms. The daily RSI has been in the mid-to-high 30’s most of the month of August, well below outright bear market conditions but not in the sub-30 range that typically indicates exhaustion. MACD is flat and slightly negative, and that usually means that momentum is stalling, not an accelerating breakdown.
The immediate battle line is $1.00. The next layer of support is at the August 11 low around $0.9952, followed by the lower Bollinger Band around $0.99. If it does break through on real volume, chart watchers have identified $0.95 and $0.88 as next levels of support, with some suggesting it could fall to $0.85 and $0.70 if the psychological support levels also fail. On the positive side of things, XRP must first close above the $1.04 to $1.05 price zone, as well as the 20-day EMA and Bollinger midline, only to stabilize, and only reclaim the $1.08 to $1.09 price zone to become a threat to the overall downtrend in any meaningful way.
Note that there’s a longer-term supply wall to be aware of as well: hold-up 1.1 billion XRP in the $1.40 – $1.45 price range from a previous rally. All of those coins are considered underwater for a holder at present and might be available in any recovery simply to break even, which is why that zone continues to appear as resistance on a number of analysts charts.
Not all the signals are pointing down, mind you. A popular chart analyst, in early August, identified a Tom DeMark sequence buy signal in XRP’s monthly chart, which is also responsible for a 1,074% rise in prices when it triggered in April 2020. It’s a long-time-horizon, low-frequency signal, and a singular buy print doesn’t negate the downtrend, but it’s the sort of signal that a technical trader has in the back of his mind because of what it did the last few times.
The Catalysts That Could Still Flip the Script
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The demand issue for XRP is intertwined with a regulatory saga that has been ongoing for years, and a real deadline is nearly here.
What it is worth, the SEC’s case against Ripple is all over with. In August 2025, both parties agreed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals accepting their appeals for dismissal, bringing a long-running battle to a close that began in December 2020. The $125 million judgment imposed by the original district court is just a fraction of the $2 billion that the SEC initially requested, and no other litigation is currently pending. But in March 2026, the SEC and CFTC took another step forward by releasing a joint interpretation that XRP is a digital commodity, not a security. That’s important, but an interpretation isn’t a law, and a new group of regulators could, in theory, change that.
The CLARITY Act is designed to fill that gap. It would place XRP’s commodity status in federal law and give the CFTC permanent responsibility for overseeing it, putting an end to the legal limbo that has prevented some institutional allocators from getting involved. It cleared the House by a 294–134 vote back in July 2025 and advanced through the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 in May 2026. It has been flat since then. The Senate has yet to give it floor time, and it’s unlikely to get it before another cloture vote on Sept. 15, the day after the Senate gets back from its August recess, at the hands of Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Prediction markets have been following the odds as they moved all along: Polymarket had the bill at an 82% chance of becoming law back in February. By the first of August, that was down to about 30%. Estimates were closer to 19-20% in mid-August. That fading probability follows closely with the ETF outflow data, institutional money doesn’t tend to emerge early to a bill that may fail to pass.
There’s a nearer-term event worth watching too. Trump will meet executives of Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, Robinhood and other crypto and prediction-market companies at the White House Aug. 19, ahead of the first meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) the following day. Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, is a member of that committee. Big policy-adjacent announcements from this administration have a tendency to happen on weird dates, and how this meeting affects price remains to be seen, plenty of similar White House crypto events have happened without lasting impact. However, it is a definite day on the calendar in a market that has been lacking such an event. As far as institutional demand, there’s at least one quiet vote of confidence: the National Bank of Canada revealed exposure to XRP by holding onto it via some ETFs, which was done in a recent 13F filing, indicating that traditional finance hasn’t written the asset off.
Staying Safe While XRP Chops Around $1
The sharp price changes are bound to draw both traders and scams. Fake giveaway accounts, cloned exchange login pages, and double your XRP schemes spike along with search interest every time XRP is in the news, from whale moves to an ETF milestone to meet the White House. In particular, escrow releases are impersonated at all times, scam accounts impersonating Ripple or Whale Alert for official announcements that contain phishing links.
The bottom line is this: anyone sending money to a wallet address they’re not familiar with is a scam, and any message that’s not expected, whether it’s XRP rewards, an airdrop, or a support request, can be considered a scam until proven otherwise. When in doubt, send any address to a wallet scanner that compares it to a list of known scams, and it will take only a couple of seconds and will save you from an irreversible address that no customer service phone number can fix once it’s on chain.
That’s a red flag or a buying opportunity?
All of the XRP price predictions online these days are essentially variants of one of these two narratives. Both are backed up by real evidence, which is why this setup has traders more split than ever.
The bear case: The demand for the ETF is all but gone, retail participation has been spotty at best, and a real legislative push just got delayed with increasingly unlikely chances of being passed this year. According to that interpretation, $1 is not a floor, but rather a speed bump in the road, and a big break paves the way to $0.95 and then $0.88, with some predicting a $0.70 or less if the selling gets out of hand.
The bull case: whales are piling up at a rate not seen in months, the monthly escrow schedule just produced one of the tightest net releases that it has ever produced, the legal overhang from the SEC case is completely removed, and there is now a real regulatory calendar on August 19th and September 15th that was not there a few months ago. In that view, this fall to $1 appears to be the same type of sentiment-driven/oversold backfill that has preceded XRP’s strong reversals in the past.
That will likely come down to who blinks first: the ETF allocators who hope for legal clarity or the whales who hope that legal clarity is near. Keep an eye out for XRP to close and hold above $1.04 to $1.05 before the price moves: the ETF flow is more important to watch first, as it tends to lead the price.
None of this is financial advice. As with all cryptocurrencies, XRP can move both up and down quicker than the formation indicates, and any of the levels mentioned here is a possible trigger point. Research and scale any placement, and consider every number in this piece as a scenario to watch instead of a guarantee.
