XRP News Today: The $100 ATH Date Is Confirmed — Here's Why

[00:00:00]Bitcoin is sitting at $64,000.

[00:00:02]Ethereum is under 1,800. The fear and greed index just printed 35, which puts this market officially in fear territory. And if you're holding XRP right now, you already know the number that matters most to you. This coin was trading at $3.65 in July of last year. Today, it's sitting around a dollar. That's a 70% drop from the high. And depending on when you bought in, that number either means nothing to you or it means everything. So, today we're going to look at where XRP actually stands right now. Not the price alone, but the stuff underneath the price. The ledger data, the ETF numbers, the lending protocol that just launched, a new privacy feature most people haven't heard about yet, and a clip from Brad Garlinghouse that explains exactly what Ripple thinks it's actually building. And I want to give you my honest take on something a popular chart analyst has been pushing lately because I think it's the wrong question entirely. Let's start with the number everyone's staring at. XRP down 70% from its July 2025 high. Now, there's two ways to read that number.

[00:01:12]And which one you land on says a lot about when you got in. If you bought in near the top, that 70% feels like a gut punch every time you check your portfolio. But if you've been accumulating over the last year, averaging in on the way down, that same 70% looks less like a disaster and more like a discount. Same number, completely different story depending on your entry point. A chart analyst who's been making the rounds lately has a theory worth talking about, mostly because it's gotten a lot of attention in XRP circles this month. He looked back at the last three XRP cycles and found they averaged around 1,410 days from bottom to cycle high. He also found that in each of those cycles, XRP dropped somewhere between 70% and 90% at the macro bottom before turning around. Based on that pattern, his model puts a possible cycle bottom sometime around the fourth quarter of this year with the next real cycle high landing somewhere between May and August of 2029. His phrase for it was pressure makes diamonds, meaning the pain right now is basically the setup for the next real move. Here's where I'll push back a little and I want to be up front that this is my opinion not a prediction. Cycle theory works fine as a rearview mirror. It's really good at explaining what already happened. It's a lot shakier as a windshield. The problem with averaging three cycles and projecting a fourth is that each of those cycles happened under completely different conditions. 2017 had no ETFs, no institutional custody, no regulatory framework being debated in Congress.

[00:02:50]2021 had a global money printing environment that doesn't exist right now. Applying the same math to 2026 and expecting the same outcome assumes the market structure hasn't changed and I think it clearly has.

[00:03:04]The macro backdrop today with a regulatory framework actually moving through Washington and real institutional infrastructure being built doesn't really resemble either of those earlier cycles. So personally, I'm not planning my next three years around a chart pattern from a much smaller, much less regulated market.

[00:03:22]What I do agree with from that same analysis is the practical advice underneath it, buy and hold. Dollar cost average regardless of price. Don't try to time the exact bottom because nobody actually knows where it is until it's already behind you. The analyst framed the current price zone as ascending support, meaning even with the drawdown, the higher lows over time still point in a reasonable direction. Whether or not you buy the 1400 day cycle math, dollar cost averaging through a fear zone instead of trying to catch the exact bottom is just sound, boring, unglamorous investing advice. It's not exciting content, but it's usually the right move. There's one technical indicator worth mentioning here because it's been getting attention in trading circles. The XRP to Bitcoin monthly supertrend indicator has been bearish for a while now, meaning XRP has been losing ground against Bitcoin specifically, not just against the dollar. That's an important distinction.

[00:04:21]A coin can hold its dollar value reasonably well while still bleeding against Bitcoin, and that's basically what's been happening. There are early signs this indicator might be starting to flip, but it hasn't confirmed yet.

[00:04:34]So, treat that as a thing to watch rather than a thing that's already happened. Now, let's talk about what I think is the actually important story here because I think everyone arguing about cycle bottoms and price targets is asking the wrong question. The right question isn't when does XRP pump. The right question is whether the rails are actually getting used. And historically, in almost every asset class, utility tends to show up before price catches up to it, usually by something like 12 to 18 months. So, instead of staring at a chart trying to guess a bottom, let's look at what's actually moving on the ledger itself.

[00:05:10]The XRP ledger just crossed 8 million accounts. Now, I want to be straight with you about what that number does and doesn't mean because a lot of channels will just throw that number out there and let you assume it means 8 million people. It doesn't. A single person can hold multiple wallets. Exchanges hold enormous numbers of these accounts on behalf of thousands of users in a handful of addresses. So, 8 million accounts is not the same thing as 8 million unique holders. What it does tell you is that activity on the ledger itself, wallets being created, addresses being used, is climbing. That's a real signal, just not the specific one the headline number implies. On the ETF side, there's currently about 970 million XRP locked up in US spot ETFs.

[00:05:59]And when you add up global totals, that number crosses 1 billion. If US ETF holdings alone cross that 1 billion mark, and it's getting close, that's the kind of round number that tends to generate its own media cycle, regardless of whether the number itself is fundamentally meaningful. Round numbers move headlines. That's just how this works. There's also ongoing speculation about which major players might launch their own spot XRP products next, with names like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley coming up in conversations around the space.

[00:06:32]Nothing confirmed there, so treat that as speculation for now, not fact. Let's get into something most competing channels haven't really covered in detail, which is the lending protocol that recently launched on the XRP ledger. A well-known figure in the XRP community who goes by Vet put out a breakdown with three specific warnings before anyone jumps into using it, and I think these are worth repeating word for word because they're just good advice regardless of what asset you're dealing with. First, understand exactly where the yield is actually coming from before you deposit anything. If you can't explain in one sentence what generates the return you're being offered, that's a red flag, not a detail to figure out later. Second, check the reputation, the track record, and the licensing of whatever project is borrowing your funds. Insurance matters here, too. A protocol that's been operating for years with a clean track record is a very different risk profile than something that launched last month with an anonymous team behind it. And third, and this is the one that matters most, don't lend with money you can't afford to lose. Start small. Test the process yourself with an amount that wouldn't hurt if something went wrong before you ever consider scaling up. Lending protocols on any chain carry real risk and XRPL is no exception just because it's a more established ledger. Now, here's something genuinely new that a lot of channels covering this topic have missed entirely. XRPL just rolled out confidential properties for what are called multi-purpose tokens or MPTs.

[00:08:07]This uses something called Elgamal encryption which is a form of homomorphic encryption. In plain terms, that means the network can verify a transaction is valid and that the total supply still adds up correctly without actually revealing the specific amounts involved in that transaction. So, if a bank moves value across the ledger using this feature, outside observers can see that a transaction happened and roughly which wallets were involved, but the actual dollar amount stays hidden. I want to be precise about what this does and doesn't cover because it's easy to overstate a feature like this. Wallet addresses and the flow of funds between them remain fully visible on chain. Only the amounts themselves are private. This isn't full privacy in the way something like Monero handles it. Think of it as a stepping stone. It's specifically being built with institutional use cases in mind, banks and payment companies that need transaction amounts kept confidential for competitive or regulatory reasons, but that still need the underlying settlement to happen on a transparent, verifiable public ledger.

[00:09:15]From what's being discussed, fuller privacy features are being targeted for somewhere around 2027. So, this current rollout is really phase one of a longer road map. Let's move to a genic payments because the growth numbers here are honestly the most underrated part of this entire story.

[00:09:33]XRPL just crossed 1.3 million a genic payments, meaning payments initiated by AI agents rather than a human clicking a button. In the most recent 24-hour window, 100,000 new payments were processed, which puts the current pace at somewhere around 3 million payments a month.

[00:09:54]Some people close to this space are projecting that pace could scale to somewhere between 10 and 20 million payments a month if adoption continues at its current trajectory. There's also positioning happening around a partnership angle with MasterCard specifically built around what people are calling the agentic economy, meaning a future where a meaningful share of digital payments are initiated by software agents acting on behalf of a person or a business rather than a human directly. Here's the piece that ties this whole segment together, and it's something I haven't seen another channel connect explicitly. Agentic payments need a stable settlement asset to actually scale because you can't have an AI agent making thousands of automated payments a day if the underlying asset it's using is swinging 5 or 10% in value while the transaction is settling.

[00:10:44]That's exactly where Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin comes in. RLUSD has been steadily growing its market cap through the middle of this year, and it's increasingly showing up integrated into DeFi protocols and payment corridors directly on the XRP ledger.

[00:11:02]The connection here is straightforward once you see it.

[00:11:05]XRP handles the bridge liquidity for cross-asset settlement, while RLUSD provides the stable unit of account that agentic payment volume actually needs to scale without introducing volatility risk into every single transaction. One is the plumbing, the other is the water pressure regulator, and you genuinely need both working together for this agentic payment story to scale the way people are projecting.

[00:11:32]This is worth watching closely over the next few months, and if RLUSD supply keeps climbing at its current pace, that's arguably a more important leading indicator for XRPL adoption than the price of XRP itself. Now, let's bring in Brad Garlinghouse because a recent interview clip of his lays out the actual thesis behind all of this in a way that's worth hearing directly. His core argument is that the payments industry today is still fundamentally a closed network problem. He compared it to the early internet back when CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy all existed as separate closed systems that couldn't talk to each other. You couldn't send a message from an AOL account to a CompuServe account. Eventually, the internet solved that by becoming an open interoperable standard that every network could plug into.

[00:12:23]Garlinghouse's argument is that cross-border payments today are stuck exactly where email was before that shift. Sending money from a bank in one country to a bank in another still routes through multiple intermediary banks, takes days in some cases, costs real money in fees, and regularly produces errors that require manual correction. His point about consumers is the one that stuck with me most. He said plainly that the average person sending money internationally does not care about blockchain, does not care about XRP, does not care about the underlying technology at all. What they care about is whether the money arrives fast and whether it costs them very little to send it.

[00:13:07]According to Garlinghouse, XRP transactions settle in about 4 seconds for a fraction of a penny in fees, and that's the actual selling point to a bank or a payment company, not the ideology of decentralization, the speed and the cost. He also touched on something that I think explains a lot of the slow pace we've seen out of Washington. He said there's still a real education gap in Congress, meaning a lot of lawmakers working on crypto legislation simply don't have a technical background in how any of this works. And that part of Ripple's job right now is translating fairly complex settlement mechanics into something a non-technical lawmaker can actually act on with confidence. That's not a knock on Congress specifically, it's just the honest reality of legislating a technology this new. So, let's pull all of this together because I think when you look at these pieces side by side, the picture is a lot more interesting than a single price chart. XRP is down 70% from its high, and that pain is real if you bought near the top. A popular cycle model says we might not see a real high again until 2029, and I've told you honestly why I don't fully buy that projection given how different the current market structure is from previous cycles. But separate from all of that price debate, the ledger itself hit 8 million accounts. ETF holdings are approaching 1 billion tokens in the US alone. A lending protocol launched with real institutional grade cautions attached to it. A genuinely new privacy feature rolled out for institutional use cases. A genetic payment volume is climbing every single month, and RLUSD is quietly building the stable liquidity layer that all of that a genetic volume actually needs to function at scale.

[00:14:52]None of that shows up directly in the price today. And that's kind of the point. If utility really does lead price by 12 to 18 months the way it has in other cycles and other asset classes, then the actual question worth asking isn't when does this pump, it's whether the usage numbers keep climbing month over month because that's the thing that tends to show up in the price eventually, not the other way around. I want to hear from you on this one. Are you watching the price chart right now, or are you watching the usage numbers instead? Drop a comment and let me know which one you actually think matters more at this stage. If this breakdown was useful to you, consider subscribing.

[00:15:32]We're getting close to 4,000 and it genuinely helps the channel keep making content like this. Aloha and I'll see you in the next one.