XRP slides under $1 as bearish bets pile up, 200K tokens drained

XRP slipped below $1 for the first time since Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November 2024, falling as low as $0.99 during the session. The break unwinds one of the most important thresholds from XRP's post-election rally, which carried the token from its first $1 cross on Nov. 16, 2024 to a $3.42 peak in July 2025.

A separate security scare hit the same week. An XRPL account tied to the Coreum bridge drained 199,916.3 XRP across 94 outgoing payments on Aug. 9, leaving a balance of just 493.5 XRP.

Why it matters

Initial fears that "rippling" had hit the XRP Ledger itself were quickly ruled out: XRPL.to traced the flaw to relayer software that accepted attacker-controlled deposits as legitimate, then let unbacked bridge balances be redeemed for native XRP. The native ledger was not compromised, but the timing landed as XRP's order book thinned. Binance's 24-hour XRP volume had fallen to roughly $68 million from levels above $1 billion, and commentator Vincent Van Code estimated that as little as $4 million of sell orders could push XRP toward $0.95 under those conditions, a level likely to force leveraged longs to close.

Market impact

The bearish positioning is most visible in derivatives. Binance's seven-day change in XRP open interest swung from about -13% on Aug. 1 to +7.4% by Aug. 11, with analyst JA Maartunn flagging an additional $171 million, or 20.5%, in notional exposure. Yet Binance perpetual CVD deepened from approximately -$251 million to -$349.5 million over the same window, and spot CVD across centralized exchanges flipped from about +$193 million to -$34.3 million, a $227 million deterioration. CoinGlass put the long-to-short account ratio at 0.8432, with 54.3% of positioned accounts short. XRP futures open interest sat near $2.69 billion against $2.17 billion in 24-hour turnover on Tuesday, well below the $5.93 billion derivatives volume seen on Jan. 5 when open interest stood around $3.86 billion.

Institutional demand is still flowing through that tape. US-listed XRP products booked $81.59 million in April, $131.94 million in May, $59.46 million in June, and $27.29 million in July, a four-month streak just over $300 million, lifting cumulative inflows to roughly $1.5 billion. Santiment data shows wallets holding more than 1 million XRP rose by 32 over the past three months. Ripple separately secured full MiCA authorization in July, and the XRPL ranks among the top 10 blockchains for tokenized real-world assets with more than $4 billion locked.