XRP at one point fell below $1, giving up a key price line formed shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory.

On Aug. 12, blockchain media outlet CryptoSlate reported that XRP slipped to as low as $0.99 during the session, its lowest level since November 2024.

The decline coincides with a change in market structure. XRP first broke above $1 on Nov. 16, 2024, then rose to $3.42 on July 2025, but later gave back most of those gains amid broad weakness in the crypto market. Recent exchange flows have also tilted toward selling, weakening momentum for a short-term rebound.

Bearish signals also appeared in derivatives markets. Based on CryptoQuant data, Binance’s 7-day rate of change in XRP open interest rebounded to 7.4 percent on Aug. 11 from about minus 13 percent on Aug. 1. CryptoQuant analyst JA Martuun pointed to data he tracked showing XRP open interest rose by $171 million. The inflow of new positions, however, did not translate into stronger buying.

Binance perpetual futures cumulative volume delta (CVD) worsened to minus $349.5 million on Aug. 11 from about minus $251 million in early August. Estimated spot CVD for centralized exchanges also turned negative over the same period, falling to minus $34.3 million from about $193 million. That indicates market sell orders led in both futures and spot markets.

Positioning tracked by Coinglass also leaned bearish. When XRP traded near $1, the long-to-short account ratio was 0.8432. About 45.7 percent of accounts were long and 54.3 percent were short. An increase in open interest alone does not determine whether longs or shorts rose, but looking at execution flows together suggests sellers are holding short-term control despite fresh capital inflows.

XRP analyst Vincent Van Code warned that Binance’s 24-hour XRP trading volume fell to about $68 million from above $1 billion before the move below $1. In a thinner order book, even relatively small sell orders can increase price volatility, he said. He added that a sell order of about $4 million alone could push XRP down to $0.95, and that liquidations of leveraged long positions could follow.

Market unease also overlapped with security issues. On Aug. 9, 199,916.3 XRP was moved in 94 transfers from an XRP Ledger account used for the Coreum bridge to two newly created wallets. The account balance then fell to about 493.5 XRP from about 200,000 XRP. Early warnings circulated that the XRP Ledger’s rippling feature was to blame, but later analysis shifted weight to a flaw in the bridge logic. XRPL.to said base XRP could not have been moved in that way, and that all 94 withdrawals were approved through the bridge’s own multisignature process.

Not all indicators point to weakness. Spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded net inflows of $81.59 million in April, $131.94 million in May, $59.46 million in June and $27.29 million in July. With inflows extending for four straight months, cumulative inflows rose to about $1.5 billion. Santiment data also showed the number of wallets holding at least 1 million XRP rose by 32 over the past three months.

Ripple’s institutional expansion is also continuing. In July, Ripple secured full authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, allowing it to provide related services in the European Economic Area (EEA). Alongside that, the XRP Ledger was granted a permission that allows token balances and transaction amounts to be encrypted while enabling selective access for issuers, auditors and regulators. The XRP Ledger is also one of the top 10 blockchains in tokenised real-world assets (RWA) by total value locked, at more than $4 billion.

XRP’s market is ultimately in a phase where short-term price moves and ecosystem expansion diverge. Spot and derivatives markets are showing selling dominance and shrinking liquidity, while institutional inflows, growth in large holders and Ripple’s institutional expansion continue separately.

$XRP is about to break the phsychological $1 support. While most people will freak out, and will likely trip a cascading sell down to 0.95, it's important to note the 24h volume. On Binance it's a mere $68M, down from well over $1BN At these numbers it's very simple to… pic.twitter.com/2FP1qv1L6w