As XRP tries its hardest to avoid falling below the psychologically important $1 level, an interesting development is taking place in the background. Data collected on Tuesday shows that over the past 2 weeks, both long and short positions on XRP have been punished, and yet the cryptocurrency has barely made any move in either direction.
XRP sees long, short liquidations
According to the data, XRP price closed around $1.11 on Monday, essentially unchanged from the price range seen 2 weeks ago. Notably, on July 21, XRP price briefly touched the $1.14 level, resulting in shorts getting liquidated to the tune of $2.35 million.
On Friday, XRP longs paid the price as $1.89 million worth of positions got liquidated and the digital asset’s price fell to $1.091. The intense volatility shows that XRP is actively hunting both shorts and longs and then snapping back into the middle.
Over the full window of the past week, long liquidations had an average of $647,000 – up about 19 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Meanwhile, short liquidations hovered around an average of $518,000, up an astonishing 141 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
Amidst the liquidity hunting on both sides, XRP’s compression is the key detail. Notably, XRP’s realized volatility is rapidly collapsing, with price coiling into a $1.09 to $1.14 band while open interest remains firm around the $420 million level.
Meanwhile, exchange funding is hovering around 0.001 – showing that neither side has a decisive control over the cryptocurrency. Exchange flows to Binance remain thin as well, as both inflows and outflows are down about 98 percent compared to monthly baseline levels.
In the same vein, XRP deposit addresses have tumbled by 96 percent, resulting in fragile liquidity for the digital asset. As a result, small position clusters can continue to trigger the sharp two-sided flushes.
XRP whales are still accumulating
Even though the cryptocurrency is not giving any clues about its next potential direction, XRP whales continue to buy the 6th-largest digital asset by market cap. According to on-chain data seen on Wednesday, XRP whales bought 2.8 percent more XRP compared to the previous 5 weeks.
This behavior by the whales isn’t all that surprising, considering that XRP has been teasing a bullish move over the past few weeks. That said, seasoned crypto analyst Crypto Patel said on July 14 that XRP could fall all the way down to $0.87 by December 2026.
