XRP Price Forecast - XRP-USD Holds $1.42 as Supreme Court Kills Trump Tariffs and CLARITY Act Bets Rise

XRP Price – Court shocks, tariff relief and Washington’s “CLARITY” gamble collide in one tape

XRP-USD is pinned around $1.42, trading in a narrow band between roughly $1.39 and $1.43 after a sharp February slide that already took the token down toward the $1.10 area earlier in the month. That leaves price more than 30% below recent highs despite being almost unchanged over the past 24 hours. Structurally, this sits on top of an ugly seasonal pattern: in 7 of the last 11 Februarys XRP has finished the month lower, with brutal declines of about -33.4% in 2014 and -22.1% in 2018. The difference this time is that the drawdown has already happened, price is coiling instead of free-falling, and the news flow into the next four to eight weeks is unusually dense for both macro and XRP-specific catalysts.

XRP-USD – Price, ranges and what the market is really discounting now

Spot is effectively orbiting $1.42, sitting mid-range between the early-month washout near $1.10 and the recent local highs just under $1.50–$1.60. Intraday action is compressed, with daily ranges of only a few cents and realized volatility dropping toward the lows seen in late 2024. That tells you positioning is stale and leveraged traders are waiting for the next trigger rather than forcing a direction. On higher time frames, the key immediate support sits in the $1.35–$1.40 band, with a deeper line in the sand around $1.10–$1.15, while the upside pivot remains the $1.50–$1.62 zone that capped the last bounce. The fact that the token is holding mid-range even after a difficult macro tape suggests sellers are getting tired, but the order book is still not confident enough to build a sustained trend without a new catalyst.

Macro shock – Supreme Court kills Trump’s emergency tariffs and removes one layer of policy risk

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling invalidating most of Donald Trump’s emergency tariff regime under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is a genuine regime-shift headline. Trump had used a fentanyl-related emergency and then a “trade deficit” emergency as the legal basis to levy broad tariffs on imports from Canada, China, Mexico and Europe, something no president had done in nearly fifty years of IEEPA’s existence. By saying explicitly that the statute does not authorize tariffs of that scope, the court has shut down a key channel for unilateral trade escalations under emergency powers. For risk assets, including XRP-USD, that removes a floating overhang. Corporates and investors now face less tail-risk of sudden, legally untested tariff waves that could crush global growth and force defensive de-risking across portfolios. That is why the first reaction across markets was a pop higher in equities and a brief spike in crypto.

Macro friction – Stagflation signals keep the Fed cautious and cap upside for high-beta tokens

The problem is that the same day delivered a very different macro message from U.S. data. Real Q4 2025 GDP running around 1.4% annualized, and roughly 2.2% growth for the full year – the weakest since the pandemic shock – tells you momentum is fading. At the same time, core PCE inflation near 3.0% year-on-year, above the Fed’s 2% target and a touch hotter than prior readings, reinforces the idea that price pressures are not yet fully tamed. That combination – slower growth and sticky inflation – is classic stagflation risk. It gives the Federal Reserve every excuse to delay rate cuts and keep real yields elevated. For XRP-USD, that matters because cheap money and falling real yields are the fuel that typically powers the strongest crypto legs higher. Right now, the tape is sending the opposite signal: the U.S. dollar index is on course for one of its strongest weekly gains since October, Treasury yields are firm, and that backdrop naturally limits how far and how fast XRP can run even when idiosyncratic news is positive.

Risk appetite – Why Bitcoin’s tariff spike faded and what that says about crypto liquidity

The immediate cross-asset reaction to the Supreme Court decision showed how crypto is trading in this environment. Bitcoin (BTC-USD) jumped roughly 2% through $68,000 on the headline, breaking a level that has been a clear pivot in recent weeks, and then quickly gave the move back, sliding back below $67,000 within minutes. That whipsaw was not backed by heavy spot volume, and depth on order books remains thin compared with the 2021 cycle peaks. For XRP traders, the message is clear: macro headlines can still trigger sharp, short-lived moves, but durable follow-through requires either a structural liquidity impulse (for example, large ETF inflows) or a clean break in the policy narrative that shifts the path for growth, inflation or regulation. Right now, the tariff relief is real, but the stagflation risk and higher-for-longer rates are equally real, so the net impact is an incremental improvement, not a full-blown green light.

Policy path – CLARITY Act odds, stablecoin yield fight and what this can unlock for XRP-USD

While the macro balance is mixed, the regulatory side of the XRP story leans clearly positive. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has raised his probability for passage of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act to roughly 90% by late April, after months of lobbying and detailed negotiations in Washington. That is not soft language; it is a highly confident call from a key stakeholder, and it matters for XRP because the Act is designed to define the federal rules for when and how tokens are treated as securities or commodities, and how trading venues, custodians and intermediaries must register. XRP has already survived a high-profile courtroom battle over its status. If Congress now hard-codes a coherent market-structure framework, it lowers legal uncertainty for every U.S. institution considering direct XRP exposure, XRP-based products or XRP-connected payment flows. The sticking point in the talks is stablecoin yield – whether interest-like payments on tokenized dollars sit in securities, banking or a hybrid regime. The latest White House meeting did not fully resolve the drafting, but the tone from participants, including the chief legal officer of a major U.S. exchange, was “constructive” and “cooperative.” That signals the fight is about line-by-line definitions, not about whether the space deserves a regulatory lane at all. For XRP, a clean resolution here would mean that bank-grade stablecoin and tokenized cash flows could scale on ledgers like XRPL without constant fear of retroactive enforcement, which directly increases the long-term addressable demand for XRP as the native asset that underpins that ecosystem.

Institutional rails – XRP ETFs, new filings and how product depth quietly changes the game

On the product side, XRP-USD already sits inside a growing stack of regulated vehicles. Franklin Templeton’s Franklin XRP ETF (XRPZ) is listed on NYSE Arca, adding to a suite of European XRP ETPs that hold the token directly. That means institutional allocators who care about custody, audit and compliance can already build and rebalance XRP positions without touching offshore spot exchanges. The SEC’s next decision point is February 26, the date by which it must either approve, deny or extend its review of NYSE Arca’s proposal for the T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF, an actively managed fund that includes XRP among its eligible holdings. Even if the commission chooses to delay, the structural trend is obvious. Every new multi-asset crypto ETF that includes XRP-USD beside BTC-USD and ETH-USD deepens secondary-market liquidity, narrows bid–ask spreads, and makes it easier for wealth platforms, private banks and model portfolios to treat XRP as a routine satellite allocation rather than a fringe bet. This is not the sort of news that drives a 20% daily candle, but it is exactly the kind of plumbing change that shows up months later in steadily rising base demand.

XRPL tokenization – Treasuries, RWAs and why slow institutional flows matter more than hype

Under the surface, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is becoming a serious venue for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Public blockchains now host over $24 billion of tokenized RWAs, including government debt and commodity exposures, and XRPL’s share has climbed above roughly $354 million in the past month. Reports indicate that around 63% of tokenized U.S. Treasuries now sit on XRPL, a statistic that would have sounded absurd a few years ago. Big names such as DBS Group and Franklin Templeton are building trading and lending infrastructure around tokenized money-market fund units issued on XRPL, while other institutional players experiment with tokenized funds and structured products. For XRP’s price, these flows are not dramatic on day one, but they are structurally important. Tokenized Treasuries, funds and loans need a settlement and liquidity layer. As more of those instruments live natively on XRPL, network activity, fee flows and demand for XRP as the bridge asset grow together. That is how you build a floor under a token over a multi-year horizon: not through marketing slogans, but by turning it into the backbone of “boring,” recurring financial activity that large balance sheets care about.

Bank partnerships – Deutsche Bank’s move toward Ripple Payments and the message for the legacy rails

One of the clearest signals that XRP’s infrastructure is forcing its way into the legacy system is Deutsche Bank’s decision to partner with Ripple Payments as part of SWIFT’s own blockchain-related modernization efforts. The traditional cross-border system is under heavy criticism for its slowness and cost. By aligning with Ripple’s technology shortly after Ripple secured its first EMI license, Deutsche is effectively saying it wants to be positioned at the front of the line as cross-border payments migrate to tokenized and real-time models. Importantly, banks can use Ripple’s rails without holding XRP on balance sheet, but adoption still matters for XRP-USD for three reasons. First, every successful project using Ripple tech for high-value payments is proof of concept that strengthens Ripple’s brand and makes other banks more comfortable committing capital. Second, once the legal framework around digital assets is clearer, the step from “using the rails” to “holding the asset” gets much smaller. Third, even if banks do not hold XRP directly, ecosystem growth attracts hedge funds, macro funds and specialized credit managers who are perfectly willing to take token exposure as a levered play on the underlying network.

Derivatives positioning – Binance funding, short crowding and the setup for a squeeze

On the derivatives side, the most telling signal is the collapse in funding rates on major venues. On Binance, XRP perpetual futures funding has fallen to roughly -0.028%, the lowest level since April 2025. A negative funding rate, especially when it sits at extremes, tells you that short positions are crowding in and are paying longs to keep the trade on. That is exactly what “short exhaustion” looks like. In late 2024 and again in April 2025, similarly depressed funding levels preceded sharp upside reversals in XRP-USD as shorts were forced to cover into rising price. There is no guarantee the pattern repeats, but the mechanics are the same: once an event – whether it is a softer inflation print, a positive CLARITY Act headline or an ETF decision – forces price a few percentage points higher, heavily crowded shorts have to decide whether to pay increasingly expensive funding or buy back in a thin book. That is how 5–10% moves turn into 20–30% squeezes.

Market structure – Volatility compression, key levels and how XRP-USD is positioned into the next data drops

Right now XRP trades like a coiled spring. Realized volatility has slid toward the lows seen at the end of 2024, and intraday ranges around $1.40–$1.45 are tight compared with the swings earlier in February. Support on spot sits near $1.39–$1.40 with more meaningful structural support down around $1.10–$1.15, the zone where the last heavy flush found buyers. Resistance is clustered first near $1.44–$1.50, then around $1.62, and above that the chart opens toward the prior impulse highs. The next catalysts are clear. On the macro side, traders will be watching the upcoming PCE inflation data and GDP revisions to see whether stagflation concerns intensify or ease. Another upside surprise in inflation with weak growth would strengthen the dollar and likely push XRP back toward the lower end of its range. A softer inflation print or clearer signs of growth stabilizing would encourage risk-taking and make it easier for XRP to punch through $1.50. On the policy side, the SEC’s T. Rowe decision window and the congressional timeline on the CLARITY Act are the obvious focal points.

Scenario map – Bull, base and bear paths for XRP-USD in the coming months

In a bullish path, the CLARITY Act progresses roughly in line with the optimistic timetable, stablecoin yield rules land in a way that gives banks and asset managers a usable framework, the SEC either moves constructively on multi-asset ETFs that include XRP or at least avoids a hard rejection, and U.S. inflation drifts lower enough for the Fed to validate rate-cut expectations into the second half of the year. In that combination, shorts are structurally on the wrong side, funding normalizes from deeply negative, and XRP-USD can retake and hold levels above $1.60, with a realistic path toward testing the prior cycle highs. In the base case, progress on regulation continues but at a frustrating pace, inflation remains sticky but not out of control, the Fed keeps delaying cuts without turning aggressively hawkish, and crypto flows stay choppy. Under that path, XRP remains range-bound, roughly between $1.20 and $1.70, with squeezes fading as quickly as they appear and traders forced to respect levels rather than narratives. In the bear case, the inflation data forces the Fed into a harder line, markets start to price out 2026 cuts, the dollar rips higher, risk assets re-rate lower and one or more of the expected regulatory milestones is delayed or derailed. In that environment, short-term squeezes can still happen, but the path of least resistance for XRP-USD would be down toward and potentially through the $1.10 floor.

Verdict on XRP-USD – Positioning the trade after tariffs, CLARITY politics and on-chain shifts

Putting the pieces together, the backdrop for XRP-USD is not cleanly bullish, but it is better than the headline price action suggests. The Supreme Court has removed a major source of trade-policy uncertainty, the CLARITY Act negotiations are further along than most global investors realize, XRPL is quietly turning into a serious platform for tokenized Treasuries and RWAs, banks such as Deutsche Bank are aligning with Ripple Payments, and derivatives positioning shows signs of short crowding and exhaustion at a time when spot volatility is unusually depressed. The macro side – slower growth, sticky inflation, a firm dollar and a cautious Fed – is the key drag, and it will continue to cap upside bursts until the data breaks in a more decisive way. Given that balance, the tape and the structural story justify treating XRP-USD as a speculative Buy with clearly defined risk, not as a complacent hold or an outright short. The risk line sits just below the $1.10–$1.15 zone that anchored the last selloff; as long as price holds above that area, the combination of short positioning, regulatory momentum and XRPL adoption argues that upside surprises will be sharper than downside drifts. If macro data forces a stronger dollar and XRP cracks that floor, the thesis changes and the trade should be reassessed quickly rather than defended on narrative alone.

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