In brief
- XRP gained 10.40% on Wednesday alone, its biggest daily jump since February 6, then extended the rally Thursday, up roughly 30% for the week.
- The move traces back to Bitcoin’s break above $72,000, fueled by a record short squeeze and a U.S. Treasury plan to double long-bond buybacks starting September 9.
- XRP’s own ETF inflows fell during the spike even as the token outperformed Bitcoin, and futures open interest has already dropped more than 11% off its rally-day peak.
XRP, the cryptocurrency created by the co-founders of Ripple, is trading near $1.29, up a whopping 30% since last weekend’s close under $1.
The move represents the coin’s strongest week in months, and one that started from a level it hadn’t touched since right before its 2024 election pump. The token bottomed at $0.9862 last week, the same zone it sat in just before November 2024’s post-election rally carried it toward an all-time high near $3.65.
Wednesday’s session did the heavy lifting. XRP gained 10.40% that day, its sharpest single-day move since February 6, when the token also jumped more than 20%. Thursday brought a second leg higher, pushing the weekly candle toward $1.32, the closest it has been to breaking the average price of the last 200 days since the beginning of the year..
The spark was Bitcoin, as is typically the case with altcoins (everything other than BTC in crypto). Bitcoin punched past $72,000 Thursday, its highest price since a June flash crash, after the U.S. Treasury said it would double long-bond buybacks to at least $4 billion per operation starting September 9. The announcement triggered $3 billion in short liquidations over 24 hours and landed hours before Trump met crypto executives from Coinbase, Ripple, and Robinhood at the White House.
That’s one way to read the bullish move, but it’s worth noting that XRP outran what its usual correlation to Bitcoin would predict. On the daily chart, the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, spiked to 79.2.
RSI measures momentum on a scale from 0 to 100, with low figures indicating the asset is oversold and high numbers signalling overbought. At nearly 80, XRP is deep into overbought territory. The coin’s Average Directional Index, or ADX, score is holding well above 29, indicating an increasing trend strength due to the explosive movement. (ADX measures trend strength, regardless of direction, with anything over 25 signaling a confirmed trend.)
The money backing the rally tells a different story. Daily XRP ETF inflows fell from $5.81 million to $2.35 million the same day the token beat Bitcoin’s gains, while Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $517 million, their biggest single-day haul since May.
Futures open interest has already dropped 11.31% from its rally-day reading, and XRP still trades about 17.5% below its 200-day trend.
In a nutshell, that all means this: It’s a big move, yes, which is sure to make XRP holders very happy. But in order to convince the bears, given the long-term trajectory, the asset must continue posting gains—even if at a slower pace—in order to activate signals of a sustained trend reversal.
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