XRP ETFs XRPI And XRPR: Deep 60% Drawdown Or Rare $8.51 Entry After $1.3B Flows?

XRP ETF Complex – XRPI, XRPR And The Stress-Test Of The “New Institutional Floor”

XRPI And XRPR Price Action – How $8.51 And $12.11 Translate The XRP Shake-Out Into ETF Terms

XRP ETF (NASDAQ:XRPI) is trading around $8.51, up 5.19% on the day after a prior close at $8.09, with an intraday range between $8.15 and $8.54 and a 52-week band of $6.50–$23.53 on roughly 618.7K average shares changing hands. That profile tells you exactly what you need to know: XRPI is still sitting much closer to the floor of this cycle than the ceiling. The underlying token has already crashed more than 60% from the $3.65 spike in July 2025, and the ETF price reflects that reset – you are paying single-digit dollars for something that traded almost three times higher at the peak of the euphoria.
REX Osprey XRP ETF (XRPR) is marking around $12.11, after closing at $11.60, inside a day range of $11.75–$12.18 and a 52-week range of $9.50–$25.99, on very thin volume of only 12.7K shares on average. XRPR is structurally the same bet – XRP exposure with ETF convenience – but with much less secondary-market liquidity. The gap between XRPI’s ~618K average shares and XRPR’s ~12K makes execution quality and slippage very different between the two. In practice, XRPI behaves like the liquid core instrument for large tickets; XRPR is more niche and will amplify liquidity risk in any fast leg lower.

XRP Spot At $1.40–$1.50 – A 60% Drawdown, A 30% Monthly Hit, But A Very Different February Than The Old Cycles

Spot XRP-USD sits around $1.45–$1.47, after already flushing to $1.11 earlier this month and then bouncing back toward the mid-$1.40s. That means February 2026 has already delivered more than a 30% drawdown, far worse than the historical February average of roughly –3%, and in the range of some of the nastiest months on record. At the same time, the starting point was very different. From the July 2025 high at $3.65 down to roughly $1.45, XRP has already shed about 60% of its value. The token is not correcting from euphoric highs anymore; it is grinding after a prolonged bleed.
Regulatory overhang is gone. The SEC fight ended in August 2025 with the joint dismissal of appeals and a clear line that secondary-market XRP is not treated as a security. That matters because every previous February since 2020 traded with litigation risk in the background. Now, if XRP is weak in February, it is not because the legal rug can be pulled at any moment – it is pure positioning, liquidity and macro.

ETF And ETP Flow Picture – $1.3 Billion Cumulative Inflows, But The First Real Air Pocket Has Appeared

One of the structural changes behind XRPI and XRPR is the institutional wrapper bid. Spot XRP products and listed ETFs have already absorbed over $1.3 billion since launch in late 2025, including a streak of roughly 43 trading days without a single outflow and early weeks where XRP products were pulling fresh money while some of the larger coins were already seeing redemptions.
That backdrop has now turned more mixed. Over the last four weeks, the four listed XRP ETFs together have seen more than $46 million in net outflows after that initial wall of buying. At the same time, dedicated XRP investment products still managed roughly $33.4 million in weekly inflows in the latest week, pushing cumulative assets under management toward $2.55 billion, even as crypto ETPs as a group lost around $173 million, with Bitcoin products bleeding about $133.3 million and Ethereum roughly $85.1 million.
For XRPI and XRPR this means the following: the structural buyer is still there in size, but it is no longer one-way. The “always-on” bid that helped absorb shocks in late 2025 is now more tactical. When you see spot XRP down 30% in a single month while AUM in products is still north of $2.5 billion, what you are looking at is not the disappearance of institutional demand – you are watching highly price-sensitive allocations cycling capital in and out.

On-Chain And Exchange Flows – 82.1 Million XRP Heading Toward Binance While DEX And Stablecoin Usage Quietly Climb

Whale behavior is currently skewed toward potential supply. Over a 30-day window, transfers into Binance have climbed to roughly 82.1 million XRP on a smoothed basis, the highest level since last December. At around $1.47 per token, that is close to $120.7 million of inventory being positioned where it can hit the order book at any moment. Those tokens do not have to be sold, but the market has to price the possibility that a chunk of them will be. That is why these flows act like an overhang until either demand clearly absorbs them or the inflows reverse.
At the same time, network usage is not collapsing. The native DEX on XRPL is running at about 1.014 million transactions on a 14-day moving average, the highest level in more than a year. The on-ledger stablecoin footprint is growing as well, with the primary USD-linked asset around $1.52 billion in market value.
Protocol upgrades are leaning in the same direction. Permissioned Domains and Token Escrow are already live, and a permissioned DEX framework is rolling out. Those changes are explicitly designed to make XRPL more usable for regulated actors – gated domains, escrow logic and compliant matching engines – without turning it into a private chain. However, the direct incremental demand for XRP itself from features like Token Escrow is still small compared with the flows that matter for price. Even if you assume reserve requirements of 0.2 XRP per object, 1,000,000 new escrow objects only tie up around 200,000 XRP, negligible against whale transfers above 82 million.

Derivatives Positioning – $2.50 Billion Of Open Interest And Funding At –0.028% Create A Crowded, Fragile Short Bias

Futures positioning is clearly leaning negative. Open interest on XRP derivatives is around $2.50 billion, roughly in line with Monday’s levels and an average near $2.26 billion over the last five days. What changed is the cost of holding those positions. Funding rates have flipped and stayed negative across major venues, with repeated prints beyond –0.02% and a local extreme near –0.028%, the lowest since April 2025.
Negative funding means the short side is paying the long side to keep the trade open. When that cost stretches and persists, you are not looking at early smart shorts; you are looking at a crowded consensus trade. That has two direct consequences for XRPI and XRPR:
– As long as spot demand stays soft and this much open interest sits short, the path of least resistance intraday is still lower. Rallies get faded because futures shorts can lean on them.
– The moment a meaningful demand catalyst appears – renewed ETF inflows, a macro squeeze, or a visible rollover in exchange inflows – the same crowding can turn into fuel for a violent short-covering spike in XRPI, XRPR and XRP itself, because shorts must buy back into a thinner market.
The last time funding was this negative, in April 2025, XRP went from roughly $1.60 to $3.65 within three months. That does not mean the same path repeats, but it shows how quickly the tape can flip once the market runs out of incremental sellers.

Technical Map For XRP-USD – Resistance At $1.73, $1.94 And $2.14, Support Between $1.33, $1.10 And The Psychological $1.00 Line

On the 4-hour chart, XRP is trading around $1.45, decisively below the 50-EMA at $1.73, the 100-EMA at $1.94 and the 200-EMA at $2.14. Those three levels are the backbone of the current cap. Until price is back above at least $1.73, every bounce is a rally into resistance, not the start of a clean trend.
Momentum, however, has started to rebuild from deeply oversold territory. The MACD line has crossed above its signal line, with green histogram bars expanding, and the RSI sits near 55, grinding higher from the low band. That combination – price below the major EMAs but with momentum turning – is exactly what you expect in a base-building or bear-market rally phase.
The market is already trading three clear scenarios:
– A continuation leg down keeps XRP trapped between roughly $1.10–$1.35, retesting the $1.33 low mentioned in short-term levels and leaving the door open to a brief flush under $1.10 if ETF flows wobble and whale sales accelerate.
– A sideways rebuild holds $1.33–$1.45 as a floor and gradually grinds back into the $1.73–$1.94 zone, effectively turning the 50- and 100-EMA cluster into a decision band for Q2.
– A reflexive upside break squeezes price from $1.45 through $1.73, then $1.94, and into the $2.14 area, where the 200-EMA sits. A full extension of that move fits with the $1.80–$2.40 corridor outlined by the more aggressive upside scenarios.
For XRPI and XRPR, that map translates roughly into three corridors of their own: continued stress means XRPI grinding in the mid-single digits and XRPR barely above its $9.50 floor; a base around XRP $1.35–$1.80 keeps XRPI anchored in the $7–$10 band and XRPR in the low-teens; a reflexive leg toward XRP $2.40 pushes XRPI back toward the mid-teens and XRPR into the high-teens to low-20s.

Macro And Correlation – Weak Bitcoin Around The Mid-$60Ks Still Dictates The Ceiling On XRP ETFs

XRP is not decoupled from the broader tape. With Bitcoin hovering near the mid-$60,000s and struggling to sustain a breakout, the entire risk complex is still trading under a macro cap. Higher real yields, cautious risk appetite and intermittent pressure on growth assets mean any alt move has to fight the gravity of the benchmark. Historically, XRP tends to move more violently than Bitcoin in both directions; when the leader drifts lower, XRP’s drawdowns are routinely deeper.
For XRPI and XRPR that means you are not simply taking XRPL and ETF-specific risk; you are also taking the full beta of a leveraged macro proxy. Structure can be perfect, upgrades can be meaningful, ETF flows can be decent – if Bitcoin is sliding from $68K to $60K, the probability that XRPI rerates sharply higher in that window is low. The best you can reasonably expect in that environment is resilience versus other alt bets and a slower bleed.

Valuation And Street Targets – Standard Chartered’s $2.80 Cut, Elevated Risk, But Still Upside From $1.45 Spot

One large bank has already marked this regime shift on paper by cutting its XRP end-2026 target from $8.00 to $2.80, a 65% reduction. That sounds brutal, but relative to the present spot area around $1.45–$1.47, it still implies a potential upside of roughly 90–95% over the next couple of years. The message is not “XRP is dead”; the message is “the old hyper-optimistic curve is gone.”
Combine that with a 2025 performance that left XRP down about 13% despite the SEC win and more than $1 billion of ETF inflows, and the current pricing starts to make sense. The market is willing to pay for legal clarity and ETF access, but not at any price, and not without proof that incremental flows are durable.
For XRPI and XRPR, the same logic applies. You are not buying a quaint discount; you are buying an instrument that is built on a token already down 60% from its highs, in a segment where multiples and expectations have been reset. The upside is real if the floor holds and demand stabilizes, but the days when you could project parabolic moves from every catalyst are over.

Instrument Choice – When XRPI Makes Sense, When XRPR Makes Sense, And When Neither Is The Right Tool

With XRPI at $8.51, XRPR at $12.11, average daily volume at roughly 618.7K shares for XRPI and only 12.7K for XRPR, the two wrappers are not interchangeable.
XRPI is the better vehicle when size and execution matter. Depth and turnover reduce slippage when XRP is swinging 10–20% in days, and the 52-week range of $6.50–$23.53 shows you exactly how violent these swings can be. If you are leaning into the view that negative funding, ETF infrastructure and network upgrades will eventually trigger a sharp squeeze back toward $2.00–$2.40 on XRP-USD, XRPI is the instrument that can actually carry size in and out during that move.
XRPR, with its $9.50–$25.99 52-week range and very thin tape, naturally suits smaller, longer-dated positions where execution urgency is low and the main objective is simple exposure through a different wrapper structure. The small float and lower liquidity will help on the way up but hurt on the way down.

Scenario Framework For 2026 – From Sub-$1 Washout To A Trade Back Toward $2.40

A hard washout scenario is still on the table. If ETF outflows accelerate beyond the current $46 million four-week bleed, whales keep pushing tens of millions of XRP onto Binance, and Bitcoin breaks decisively lower, XRP can revisit the $1.10–$1.33 band and briefly lose the psychological $1.00 line. In that environment, XRPI trades closer to its $6.50 low, XRPR to the $9.50 floor, and negative funding stays entrenched.
A base-building scenario assumes XRP holds $1.33–$1.45, ETF flows stabilize into small positive weeks off the current $2.55 billion AUM base, whale inflows cool below the 82.1 million level, and Bitcoin stops bleeding. In that case, XRP works its way back into the $1.73–$1.94 band, XRPI lives in high single digits to low teens, and XRPR stabilizes in the mid-teens.
A reflexive upside path triggers when a modest improvement in flows collides with the current crowded short positioning. Funding near –0.028% does not need a huge catalyst to flip; a handful of strong ETF inflow prints or a macro squeeze is enough. That path drives XRP through $1.73, then $1.94, and up toward $2.14–$2.40, re-rating XRPI into the mid-teens and XRPR back toward the upper half of its $9.50–$25.99 range. That sort of move would not even break the old $3.65 high but would already deliver very strong percentage gains from current levels.

Verdict On XRPI, XRPR And XRP – High-Risk Buy With A Clear Invalidation Zone Below $1.10 XRP

Putting all of it together – spot around $1.45–$1.47, a 60% drawdown from $3.65, more than $1.3 billion in cumulative ETF inflows, $2.55 billion in product AUM, weekly inflows of $33.4 million against broader outflows of $173 million, whale transfers of 82.1 million XRP to Binance, funding at –0.028%, open interest at $2.50 billion, and EMAs stacked above price at $1.73, $1.94 and $2.14 – the structure is not comfortable, but it is asymmetric.
As long as XRP holds the $1.10–$1.33 zone on closing levels and ETF outflows stay contained, XRPI and XRPR are a high-risk Buy with a bullish bias toward a medium-term move back into the $1.80–$2.40 corridor on XRP-USD and a re-rating of the ETFs into the low- to mid-teens. A decisive break of $1.10 with sustained trading under $1.00, combined with continued ETF outflows and still-elevated whale exchange inflows, would invalidate that view and flip the stance to Sell.

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