XRP Price Forecast - XRP-USD at $1.88: Bearish Channel Targets $1.62 Before Any Shot at $3.00

XRP-USD Price Snapshot And Market Context

XRP-USD Intraday Action Around $1.88–$1.90

XRP-USD trades near $1.88–$1.90 on December 23, 2025. The token is down about 2–3% over the last 24 hours, after opening the session close to $1.90 and printing a tight day range around $1.866–$1.910. Daily spot volume is near $2.5 billion, so this is an active tape, not an illiquid drift. Year to date, XRP-USD is roughly 13% lower, but still about 70–80% above early 2025 levels near $1.10. The bigger damage is relative to the cycle high: price has dropped about 50% from the July peak at $3.67. The move comes inside a broad crypto pullback, with total market cap off about 2.4% and Bitcoin stuck around $87k–$88k in a risk-off mood.

From $3.67 Peak To Eight-Month Lows: The Downtrend In XRP-USD

The current structure is a classic post-blowoff unwind. From the July high at $3.67, XRP-USD has traced a persistent bearish regression channel. Each rally has stalled lower than the previous one, and price is now trading near levels last seen in April, effectively erasing the entire mid-year surge. The channel’s lower band, last tested in late February, is once again within reach as the market grinds down rather than capitulates in a single flush. That slow bleed reflects distribution from earlier winners and a market that is not yet oversold enough to force a violent reversal.

Support Levels: $1.90 Lost, $1.80, $1.62 And $1.25 In Focus

The intraday slip under $1.90 is not trivial. That zone had acted as a pivot and is now behaving as short-term resistance. Below that, trading feeds show buyers reacting in the $1.86–$1.87 pocket, but this is a tactical floor, not a structural base. The more important level is $1.80, which has been tested several times this year, including April, November and last week, and still holds as the main local support. Under $1.80, the technical map points to $1.62 as the first major downside objective. That is where the lower edge of the regression channel meets the April low and defines one of the weakest prints of 2025. If the market blows through $1.62 in thin liquidity, the next serious line is $1.25, the October 10 flash-crash low and the heart of the prior 2024 accumulation zone. From today’s $1.90 area, that implies about 14% risk to $1.62 and roughly 34% to $1.25.

Resistance Stack: $2.00, $2.25, $2.64 And The Old Highs

On the upside, the path is crowded with supply. The first step is a clean reclaim of the $1.95–$2.00 band, which has turned into a ceiling after multiple failed pushes. Above that sits a dense resistance block around $2.07–$2.25, where the upper side of the regression channel meets the 50-day moving average and a cluster of recent highs and lows. Higher up, $2.64 marks the May 2025 swing high, while $3.00 is both psychological and the March peak. The final resistance zone stretches across $3.40–$3.55, the July high range that launched the present downtrend. Without a sustained break through $2.25 and then $2.64, any bounce is just a rally inside a continuing bear structure for XRP-USD.

Trend Indicators: Death Cross, RSI Weakness And Stretched StochRSI

The indicator grid is unambiguously negative. XRP-USD trades well under its 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, and a death cross formed in early November when the 50-day slid below the 200-day. Daily RSI sits around 39–41, firmly in bearish territory but not yet oversold, which leaves room for another leg down before momentum exhausts. On a much longer 3-week chart, the Stochastic RSI has reportedly dropped to 0.00, an extreme that has appeared only once before at the 2022 bear-market bottom. That combination tells you the direction is still down, but the multi-week momentum is close to fully stretched. A push into the $1.62 zone would line up with that exhaustion profile.

On-Chain Activity: XRPL New Addresses And Usage Trends

Network activity on the XRP Ledger confirms fading incremental demand. Newly created XRPL addresses now average near 3,440 per day, down from about 4,501 at the start of December and dramatically lower than the roughly 13,500 daily prints seen around November 11. Fewer new addresses mean slower onboarding of fresh users and less organic demand for XRP-USD as a utility token, unless usage per address climbs sharply. At the same time, the ledger has processed more than 4 billion transactions historically, with daily throughput around 1.5 million and peaks above 5 million. That proves the infrastructure can carry size, but in the short term the address trend is a headwind, not a tailwind.

Whale Positioning: Large Holders Cut Exposure Into Weakness

Large holders are de-risking, not adding. Wallets with more than 100,000 XRP controlled about $191 billion (notional) in July, around $129 billion by October 10, near $108 billion on December 1, and roughly $104 billion now. That is a steady glide lower in whale exposure. It does not look like a panic dump, but it is consistent selling into strength and on the way down. As long as that curve slopes lower, every rebound in XRP-USD will meet selling from large addresses that are still trimming. A genuine trend change will need, at minimum, whale holdings to stabilize rather than leak.

ETF Flows: Over $1.1 Billion Of Spot Demand Versus Price Pressure

The ETF channel is the cleanest structural positive in the story. Since mid-November, several spot XRP funds have listed in the United States, including Canary’s XRPC, a Bitwise vehicle under the ticker XRP on NYSE, and Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ. Across these products, cumulative net inflows now sit above roughly $1.1–$1.25 billion, with recent sessions seeing about $44 million in a single day and an unbroken run of net buying. A former BlackRock vice president has already pointed to more than $1 billion in XRP ETF trading volume as proof that institutional access and participation are real. Yet the price of XRP-USD keeps sliding, which means ETF demand is being more than offset by spot selling and whale distribution. Structurally that is bullish for the next leg higher, but tactically it does not prevent a move to $1.62 if the rest of the market is risk-off.

Derivatives Positioning: Falling Open Interest And Lower Leverage

The derivatives layer shows leverage being removed from the system. XRP futures and perpetuals open interest have eased from about $3.54 billion to near $3.46 billion, with funding and OI together indicating that leveraged longs are cutting risk. That aligns with the price action: sharp moves are being sold rather than chased, and intraday melt-ups are rare. When you combine falling open interest with rising ETF assets, the picture is clear. Speculators are exiting leveraged positions, while more patient capital accumulates via cash vehicles. That is typical of a late-stage correction, but it does not define the timing of the final low for XRP-USD.

Sentiment Regime: Extreme Fear, Social Capitulation And Risk Of One More Leg

Social data around XRP and XRP-USD are deep in fear territory. Santiment and exchange research flag a spike in negative commentary on social platforms, back to levels last seen in late June. That earlier bout of capitulation was followed by a rally into the July high at $3.67, which is why some analysts now present sentiment as a contrarian buy signal. At the same time, Binance and other feeds note that the price has sliced below a key $1.88–$1.90 technical band and that RSI is weak, not washed out. The realistic read is simple. Sentiment is now bad enough to permit a bottom, but not strong enough to stop another leg down if $1.80 fails. Extreme fear usually appears near inflection zones; it does not guarantee that the current print is the final low.

Regulatory Backdrop: Post-SEC XRP-USD Is Now Investable For Institutions

The regulatory overhang that used to dominate every XRP-USD discussion is largely behind the market. Earlier in 2025, the SEC case against Ripple ended with a settlement near $125 million and both sides abandoning appeals. That removed the most important binary legal risk in the story and made it far easier for ETF sponsors, asset managers and banks to justify touching XRP exposure inside normal governance processes. The launch of multiple U.S. spot XRP ETFs is a direct consequence of that shift. The token is still a high-beta, volatile asset, but it is no longer treated like a legal time bomb. That change matters for the size and type of capital that can steadily accumulate over the next cycle.

Macro Environment: Crypto-Wide Risk-Off Caps Any XRP Relief Rally

Macro is still the dominant ceiling for XRP-USD in the near term. Total crypto market capitalization is down, altcoins are underperforming, and Bitcoin itself is sliding toward the lower end of its recent range around $87k–$88k. Questions around the timing and depth of future Fed rate cuts, together with lingering concerns over global growth, keep risk assets in a choppy and cautious regime. In that context, XRP strength is being sold into broader de-risking, even with positive ETF flows and fundamental headlines. Until the tape shifts back toward a clean risk-on environment, rallies in XRP will fight both sector beta and token-specific technical damage.

2026 Structural Drivers: RLUSD In Japan And XRPL Lending Plans

The long-term case for XRP-USD is being built around infrastructure rather than pure speculation. Ripple and SBI plan to bring Ripple USD (RLUSD), a fully backed USD-linked stablecoin, to Japan via SBI VC Trade in the first quarter of 2026. That will add more fiat rails, settlement volume and liquidity on XRPL in a market that has historically been very supportive of XRP. At the same time, Ripple engineers are outlining a lending framework on XRPL designed around fixed-term, fixed-rate, underwritten credit, deliberately closer to traditional institutional credit than to typical DeFi pools. If those products ship at scale, they anchor XRP deeper into cross-border payments, liquidity, and on-chain credit, which justifies a structurally higher valuation band over time, independent of short-term sentiment swings.

Short-Term Trade Map: $1.80 Versus $2.00 As The Key Battle Zone

In the short window, the trade frame is clean. On the downside, the market must defend the $1.80 region. A daily close well below that level opens the door to the regression-channel floor near $1.62, and in a stress scenario the October flash-crash low at $1.25. On the upside, any serious attempt to repair the chart starts with a decisive move back above $1.90–$2.00, followed by a test of the $2.07–$2.25 resistance band that includes the 50-day average and the upper channel edge. Failure under $2.00 keeps the dominant pattern as “sell the rally.” A reclaim of $2.25 would be the first real signal that bears have lost control of XRP-USD for this leg.

Medium-Term View On XRP-USD: Bearish Structure, Improving Plumbing

Medium term, the structure for XRP-USD is still bearish, but the plumbing is improving. Price action, moving averages and channels point toward a market that can still explore lower levels, with $1.62 and even $1.25 mathematically in play if $1.80 fails. At the same time, ETF inflows above $1.1 billion, a resolved SEC case, more than 4 billion ledger transactions, planned RLUSD deployment in Japan, and a push toward institutional-grade lending on XRPL all argue that the asset is becoming more embedded in real financial infrastructure. For now, the tape belongs to the sellers and to macro. Once this down-leg and the test of key supports are complete, that infrastructure will decide how high the next sustained range for XRP-USD can be.

That's TradingNEWS