Ripple XRP Price Forecast: XRP-USD Stuck Between $1.25 Support And $2.00 Ceiling

Ripple XRP Price – Fragile Range Around $1.50–$1.75 After A 57% Drawdown

XRP-USD is trading near $1.56–$1.60 after a brutal reset from the July 2025 peak at $3.65, a 57% drawdown that wiped out most of last year’s euphoria. The token has already crashed twice in four months: a 45% intraday collapse in October from $2.83 to $1.53 on tariff headlines, and another slide into the $1.50 area by the end of January with a 10.6% monthly loss. The first week of February added another 6% drop before stabilizing just above the October low. Structurally, XRP is oscillating in a fragile band between roughly $1.50 and $1.75 where every bounce is driven more by leverage and macro noise than by new fundamental catalysts

Macro Headwinds And Dollar Strength Crushing XRP-USD Risk Appetite

The macro setup around XRP-USD is negative. The dollar index is holding near the high-90s as rate expectations shifted back toward “higher for longer” after Kevin Warsh was tapped to head the Federal Reserve and the FOMC voted 10–2 to keep the policy band at 3.50%–3.75%. One Fed governor openly argues policy is too tight and wants “more than a point” of cuts this year, while other officials emphasize inflation risk. That split creates uncertainty rather than relief. A stronger dollar and sticky real yields usually hit high-beta crypto the hardest, and that is exactly what the tape shows: bitcoin slipping from above $126,000 in October to around $78,000, ether sliding toward $2,250, and XRP underperforming both on the way down. A partial U.S. government shutdown has already delayed the January jobs report, forcing markets to trade without clean macro data. Traders will only get detailed FOMC minutes for the January 27–28 meeting in mid-February, so until then the bias is to de-risk rather than to chase altcoins like XRP

ETF Inflows, Regulatory Wins And The Catalyst Hangover For XRP

Fundamentally, the story around XRP looks much better than the price. The SEC lawsuit is over, spot ETFs are live with roughly $1.3 billion in assets, Ripple has expanded in Singapore, and the RLUSD stablecoin is launched. Those were the “dream” catalysts the community talked about for years. They arrived, the token ripped to $3.65 in July 2025, and yet from that peak XRP still fell almost 50% by year-end and now trades 57% below the high. That pattern is consistent with prior cycles. In 2023, XRP spiked 96% on the initial SEC victory and then spent the rest of the year grinding back down toward $0.62. In late 2024, it exploded 5x from $0.50 to roughly $2.80 on the “Trump will fire Gensler” trade, formed a double-top, and spent most of the following months trapped between $0.50 and $0.70. 2025 was supposed to be the payoff year with every structural catalyst in place; instead the token dropped 48% from its July peak. The message is simple: the market front-runs good news, dumps once it’s confirmed, and treats XRP as a news-trading vehicle rather than a long-term compounder

Short-Term Structure: Golden Pocket Support And $2.03 As The Pivot For XRP Bulls

Technically, the last leg down in XRP-USD has reached what many traders define as the “golden pocket” support. After a strong opening to 2026 with a 30% surge to $2.41 in early January, the token reversed and fell almost 15% on the week into the $1.53 area. That drop completed a clean Elliott Wave leg lower, with Wave 3 finishing in the $1.55–$1.60 zone and that region acting as support. From here, the market is watching for a Wave 4 relief move. Initial resistance sits around $1.78, aligned with a 0.382 Fibonacci retracement of the recent decline. If buyers can push through $1.78, the next checkpoints are $1.93 and then $2.03. The $2.03 level is critical because it coincides with a macro 0.5 retracement and with prior congestion. Only a decisive break and hold above roughly $2.03 changes the structure from “bearish rally inside a downtrend” to something more constructive. As long as XRP keeps failing below that zone, every bounce in the $1.80–$2.00 band is vulnerable to renewed selling and another sweep of the $1.55 floor

Derivatives, Liquidations And The 749% Futures Netflow Spike In XRP

The derivatives tape around XRP has been violent and explains most of the short-term price action. From January 28 to February 2, the token plunged over 21% from $1.93 to a low of $1.52 in what was effectively a leverage flush. On January 30 alone, long positions worth $69.42 million were forced out – the biggest long liquidation day since the October 10 crash – while shorts lost only about $1.33 million. The very next day, another $57.14 million in longs were liquidated, again dominated by bulls on the wrong side of the move. That purge cleared a large chunk of late, over-levered buyers. Once that deleveraging was done, futures activity turned sharply higher. Over a single four-hour window, XRP futures inflows reached $162.22 million against $151.56 million in outflows, a net $10.67 million and a 749% jump in netflows relative to previous readings. On a 12-hour view there were still net inflows of $4.94 million, confirming that traders are re-leveraging into the bounce. Across intraday timeframes from five minutes to 12 hours, netflows flipped consistently positive, with the last hour alone showing $9.58 million in net inflows and even the five-minute slice printing a 670% jump. That fresh leverage can easily squeeze price back toward $1.90–$2.00 if spot holds above roughly $1.60. It also sets up the next air-pocket: any sentiment shift will again trigger rapid forced selling back into the mid-$1.50s

Risk Map For XRP-USD: $1.75 Ceiling, $1.25–$1.50 Base And Tail Risk Toward $0.53

Price-level mapping for XRP-USD is straightforward and all of it comes from the way the token has traded over the last two years. The band around $1.50–$1.60 is the immediate pivot; it marks the October 2025 crash low near $1.53 and the January closing low at $1.50. A clean break below that cluster invites algorithmic selling and a quick hunt for stops. The next structural shelf sits between roughly $1.25 and $1.26, the upper boundary of the pre-Trump range from 2024; that zone becomes relevant if ETF flows turn negative or if bitcoin loses the $70,000 handle. A textbook descending triangle projects to about $1.18, which implies a 25% slide from current levels if the pattern completes. Below that, $1.00 is the psychological break point that would usually require a deeper deleveraging event or a macro shock. In a more extreme risk-off phase – for example bitcoin sliding under $60,000 and a correlated stress episode in equities – the tape can very plausibly print the $0.80 region, almost a 50% drawdown from current prices. The most aggressive stress scenario points toward roughly $0.53, aligned with a classic “crypto winter” environment with bitcoin back in the $30,000–$40,000 range and risk capital drained from altcoins. On the upside, the ceiling is equally clear: $1.75–$1.80 as near resistance, $1.93–$2.00 as the first serious breakout test, and $2.03 as the structural line that bulls must retake and defend to change the narrative

Schwartz’s Probability Logic: What Current XRP Pricing Really Implies About $50–$100 Dreams

Ripple’s former CTO David Schwartz has effectively given the market a probability framework for XRP valuations. He refuses to say the token can never reach $50 or $100, but he is explicit about what today’s price says about those odds. If a large number of rational investors truly believed there was even a 10% chance of XRP trading at $100 within the next few years, they would not be willing to sell at prices far below $10. Those who hold that belief would buy aggressively until almost all supply below roughly $10 is absorbed. The fact that XRP trades around $1.50–$1.60, not $8–$10, tells you the market does not collectively assign a 10% probability to the $100 scenario with enough conviction to deploy serious capital. Schwartz’s own view is that crypto prices are mostly rational most of the time, and that big bull runs are driven by unpredictable external shocks rather than linear adoption curves. The takeaway is simple: current pricing embeds low odds for hyper-bullish targets. It does not mean those levels are impossible, but using them as a base case is detached from how the market is actually behaving

Trump Tariffs, Fed Jitters And Why XRP Trades Like A High-Beta Macro Proxy

The October 2025 45% intraday collapse in XRP from $2.83 to $1.53 was driven by tariff threats from Trump, not by any fundamental change in Ripple’s business. That event exposed how sensitive XRP is to macro politics. The latest leg down has the same flavor. Bitcoin’s price is off roughly 14% in a week, the dollar is firm as traders price fewer and later Fed cuts, and U.S. data flow is being disrupted by the shutdown. That kind of environment typically compresses risk appetite across all speculative assets and especially across tokens with a heavy derivatives footprint. XRP acts as a high-beta indicator of that risk sentiment: it rallies harder on positive macro swings and sells off violently when the market reprices rates or tariffs. As long as the narrative is “higher for longer” and political noise around trade policy remains elevated, every short-term technical bounce in XRP sits on top of a soft macro floor

Tokenization, Diamonds On XRP Ledger And Why Price Still Ignores Fundamentals

Under the hood, the Ripple ecosystem continues to generate real projects. A Dubai-based pilot to tokenize more than AED 1 billion of certified polished diamonds – roughly $280 million – on the XRP Ledger, using Ripple-linked custody technology, is a serious example of real-world asset tokenization. That kind of transaction proves the ledger can interface with tangible assets and institutional partners. It does not, by itself, guarantee price appreciation. The diamond initiative is still a pilot, subject to regulatory approvals and execution risk. Even as that news hit, XRP dropped roughly 3% on the session to about $1.58, trading in line with the rest of the crypto complex rather than decoupling on project news. This is consistent with the pattern seen across the last several years: adoption headlines and partnerships build a long-term story, but day-to-day price is dominated by macro, leverage and flows. Tokenization narratives support the case that XRP does not go to zero; they do not remove the downside path toward $1.00 or even lower if the broader environment turns hostile

Supply, Leverage And Flow: Structural Pressures On XRP-USD Price

On top of macro, XRP-USD faces persistent internal headwinds. Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow every month and roughly 300 million tokens typically enter effective circulation. That is a continuous source of potential sell-side supply for at least the next four years. At the same time, on-chain and derivatives data show that leverage has not fully reset. Even after the October flash crash and the January–February deleveraging that erased more than $6 billion in positions across bitcoin, ether and XRP, open interest remains elevated. Long liquidation cascades of $69.42 million and $57.14 million within two days on XRP futures confirm how stretched positioning was. Seasonally, February has also been a weak month for the token, with an average performance around –8% and a 29% drop in February last year. Put this together and you have a structure where every short-term bounce is happening against ongoing token unlocks, still-high derivatives exposure and a month that tends to trade heavy historically

Who Is Buying XRP Here? Whales, ETFs And Oversold Tactical Traders

Despite the pressure, there are real buyers under the market. Large wallets accumulated about 710 million XRP during January, signaling that some deep-pocketed players are willing to add near $1.50. ETFs still hold around $1.3 billion in assets, so there has not been a structural collapse in institutional interest. Momentum indicators show conditions that often attract tactical dip-buyers: daily RSI near 29 is classic oversold territory, and similar readings in previous cycles have preceded violent bear-market rallies. In 2021, XRP managed a roughly 340% move during a corrective phase even though the broader structure was already weakening. The current environment can easily deliver another sharp relief rally into the $1.90–$2.00 band if bitcoin stabilizes and the dollar pauses. The key is that these are trades, not long-term trend reversals unless the token can reclaim and hold above that ~$2.03 macro pivot

Ripple XRP Price Forecast – Base Case, Downside Case And Tail Upside

Given all the data, the most realistic scenario for XRP-USD over the next three to six months is a grind between roughly $1.25 and $1.75, with repeated attempts to break $2.00 that mostly fail on the first try. The base-case path is a slow drift that periodically tests $1.25–$1.50 as support, occasionally spikes toward $1.90–$2.00 on leverage-driven squeezes, and then mean-reverts back into the middle of the range. A breakdown scenario, with probability that cannot be ignored, takes price into the $1.00–$1.18 zone if bitcoin loses the $70,000 area or a fresh liquidation wave hits futures. An extreme drawdown toward $0.80 or even $0.53 is not the central case but is clearly on the map in a genuine “crypto winter” with bitcoin closer to $30,000–$40,000 and ETF flows turning net negative. On the upside, a sustainable move above $2.00 and then a stable base above $2.03 would tell you the market is repricing XRP higher on something new – whether that is a major banking integration, a regulatory shift, or a macro environment that suddenly favors high-beta crypto again. Until that happens, treating $2.00+ as an expected outcome, rather than as an outlier scenario, is not aligned with how the market is currently discounting risk

Ripple XRP Investment Stance – Trading Vehicle, Not A Clean Long-Term Buy

Taking all the numbers together – the 57% drawdown from $3.65 to the $1.56 area, the double crash around $1.53, the supply overhang from monthly escrow releases, the heavy derivatives footprint, exhausted 2025–2026 catalysts, and a macro environment tilted toward a firm dollar and uncertain Fed policy – XRP does not justify a clear “buy and forget” stance at current levels. For aggressive traders, XRP is a high-volatility instrument to trade between roughly $1.25 and $2.00, with well-defined technical levels and obvious leverage pockets. For anyone looking at risk-adjusted returns rather than pure volatility, the profile is closer to a Hold with a bearish tilt: downside into the low-$1 range or below is meaningfully more probable than a sustained breakout into a new structural bull leg unless a fresh catalyst appears that is not yet in the tape.

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