XRP Price Falls Below $1: Are Whales Buying the Dip?

The move itself was mechanical. XRP had been grinding in a roughly $1.00-$1.165 range since late June, and traders had stacked leveraged long positions just above the round number, betting it would hold as support. When price pressed into that level on Tuesday, those longs got force-closed — CoinGlass data shows roughly 97% of the day's near-$8.4 million in liquidations were longs, not shorts. That one-sided unwind is what turned an ordinary test of $1 into a clean breakdown to $0.992, per the day's completed candle, before XRP closed the session at $1.023. It wasn't purely a leverage story, either: two days earlier, an attacker drained nearly 200,000 XRP from the Coreum cross-chain bridge in a 97-minute exploit. The XRP Ledger itself was untouched, but the headline added to an already negative mood right as the leverage unwind hit.

Zoom out and the damage is real but not catastrophic yet: XRP is down roughly 5% over the past week and roughly 7-8% over the past month, and it's now trading below both its prior June 26 swing low of $1.009 and its 50-day moving average near $1.083 — the level that had capped its last few bounce attempts. Neither is a disaster on its own, but together they mark the first clean break of the summer range rather than another test within it.

Two demand props had been holding XRP above $1 since late June, and both gave way in the same window. Weekly spot XRP ETF inflows collapsed roughly 93% week-over-week into August 8, falling to around $1 million after a July that was already soft compared with the funds' November 2025 launch. Separately, the Senate shelved floor action on the CLARITY Act before its August 8 recess, pushing the crypto market-structure bill — and the regulatory clarity XRP bulls had been pricing in — to September at the earliest.

That leaves XRP without its two clearest near-term catalysts heading into Wednesday's US CPI print, which traders had been positioning around as a swing factor. In the event, headline and core inflation both landed exactly in line with forecasts, and the reaction was muted rather than risk-off — bitcoin, ether and XRP all held close to their pre-release ranges. So this reads as an XRP-specific story, not a market-wide one: the CPI print came and went as a non-event, while XRP's specific setup — a level ETF buyers had been defending, now undefended — is why it broke when the broader market didn't.

Here's the part that complicates a simple bearish read. CryptoQuant data shows large XRP holders have added billions of tokens to their balances over the summer downtrend, and outflows of XRP from Binance attributed to whale wallets made up about 91% of all exchange outflows — a sign large holders were moving coins into cold storage rather than positioning to sell. Retail sentiment, meanwhile, sits at multi-week lows.

That split — whales accumulating while retail sentiment craters — is the kind of divergence that has historically preceded a bottoming attempt, because it suggests the panic selling into the liquidation cascade was met by patient buyers rather than more sellers. It is not proof the low is in. CryptoQuant's own analysts frame the setup as a bottoming signal that remains vulnerable to further downside if selling pressure resumes, and one round of whale buying doesn't override a demand backdrop that's still missing its two main pillars.

The base case for the next one to two weeks is a choppy fight to reclaim $1, not a clean reversal. Whale accumulation argues for a bottoming attempt, but with ETF demand still near zero and no legislative catalyst until September, any bounce likely stays capped somewhere in the $1.10-$1.165 zone — below XRP's 50-day average and its 30-day high near $1.165 — rather than breaking back into a fresh uptrend.

The bull case needs two things to happen together: whale accumulation keeps accelerating and pulls more supply off exchanges, and ETF inflows actually turn back up alongside a swift reclaim of $1. If both show up, the flush starts to look like a capitulation low rather than the start of a bigger leg down.

The bear case is simpler and, for now, just as live. A hawkish tone out of the week-of-August-17 Jackson Hole commentary, or another leg down in ETF flows, could extend the pressure that already broke the summer range. If flows stay pinned near zero and XRP can't reclaim $1 on a sustained basis, the next real test is price territory XRP hasn't traded through since 2024. Watch the ETF flow data over the coming weeks; it's the cleanest read on whether the demand side of this trade is actually coming back, or whether Tuesday's whale buying was a one-off.