Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

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After a prolonged pullback from the 2026 peaks, when XRP traded above $3, the token appears to have once again caught the attention of major capital. Amid a local market decline, the Bollinger Bands technical indicator by TradingView has produced a setup suggesting that the ambitious target of $2 per coin remains in play.

Right now, however, XRP is going through a harsh stress test that will determine its trajectory for the second half of the year.

Point of maximum painThe current week has been tense for XRP holders. On the weekly chart, the price fell to $1.1018, coming close to testing the lower Bollinger Band at $1.0562.

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XRP price action within Bollinger Bands on a monthly timeframe. Source: TradingViewHowever, this local storm reveals an interesting picture, showing that the $2 target is not based on empty expectations:

Sellers are reaching their limit: The weekly RSI has fallen to 33.78. The market is extremely oversold, meaning bears have almost no room left to push the price lower without triggering a strong rebound.The broader structure remains intact: On the monthly timeframe, there is no sign of panic. Buyers are confidently holding the crucial Bollinger Bands midline, the 20-period SMA, at $1.1039. As long as this monthly support remains intact, the broader bullish trend has not been broken, while the RSI near 41.87 gives the price considerable room for growth.The technical compression on the charts has coincided with a strong news backdrop in early July, helping keep the token afloat.

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First, while retail traders are locking in losses, institutional investors are doing the opposite. XRP ETFs have recorded capital inflows for nine consecutive weeks, bringing their total assets under management to $1.49 billion.

Second, Ripple is strengthening its legal position. Receiving a full CASP license in Luxembourg under Europe's MiCA framework has already given assets such as XRP and RLUSD regulated access to the banking sector across all 27 EU member states. The US CLARITY Act is also approaching, and investors are already pricing it into their expectations.

Another driver has emerged from an on-chain trend in which autonomous AI agents have begun using native XRP for direct settlements, creating genuine utility-driven demand that has already exceeded one million transactions.

Roadmap to $2 for XRPThe market reality in July 2026 is simple — the path to $2 will not be easy, but the technical foundation is in place, and the Bollinger Bands confirm it. The bulls' immediate task is to keep the weekly candle above the psychological level of $1.10.

The first major resistance on the upside will be the weekly Bollinger Bands midline at $1.3021. Once this level is broken, XRP will enter a clear technical corridor through $1.54 and toward the $2.00 target.

The crypto market traded modestly, gaining 1.1% on Friday as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and XRP maintained their recent recovery levels. The gains came despite US spot ETF outflows and cautious investor sentiment, suggesting buyers continue to defend key support levels.

Bitcoin holds near $64K despite ETF outflows, treasury sell-offsBitcoin (BTC) traded slightly above $64,000 on Friday despite selling pressure from US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The funds recorded net outflows of $95 million on Thursday, marking a second consecutive day of negative flows.

Spot BTC ETF Flows. Source: SoSoValueThe move follows Bitcoin treasury company Empery Digital's disclosure in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it has sold 1,400 BTC since May at an average price of $62,200. The proceeds will be used to repay debt, fund a previously announced property acquisition and cover legal expenses.

The company also said it is shifting its strategic focus toward artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, including participation in a proposed $1 billion AI data center project. As part of the transition, Empery will discontinue publishing net asset value (NAV) updates based solely on its Bitcoin holdings, reflecting its growing exposure to AI and energy infrastructure businesses.

Meanwhile, Japan's Metaplanet announced a feasibility study with JPYC, Progmat and its securities subsidiary to explore Bitcoin-backed digital credit products.

The initiative will evaluate the use of Bitcoin as collateral alongside stablecoins and tokenization infrastructure to enable 24/7 issuance, settlement and interest payments.

Ethereum records ETF outflows as onchain activity sends mixed signalsEthereum (ETH) traded near $1,800 following another day of outflows from US spot ETH ETFs. The funds recorded net outflows of $52 million on Thursday, marking a shift in sentiment after attracting positive inflows earlier in the week.

The top altcoin’s onchain activity paints a mixed picture, according to a Thursday note by CryptoQuant contributor CryptoOnchain. While the number of regular user transactions has increased by roughly 40% over the past week, the median value of token transfers has dropped 77%.

The divergence suggests that network activity is being driven largely by low-value transactions or automated bot activity, rather than significant capital inflows from larger investors.

ETH Velocity Illusion. Source: CryptoQuantThe analyst also highlighted that Binance funding rates have surged well above their 30-day average, showing that leveraged traders are increasingly positioning for further price gains. However, this bullish sentiment has yet to be supported by meaningful on-chain capital movement, while stablecoin redemptions point to weaker buying power across the market.

CryptoOnchain stated that a disconnect between rising speculative positioning and subdued economic activity on Ethereum's network could leave the market vulnerable to a sharp deleveraging event if stronger capital inflows fail to materialize.

XRP reclaims $1.10 as derivatives activity slowsXRP traded near $1.10 as activity in the derivatives markets continued to weaken.

CryptoQuant contributor Arab Chain stated that open interest in XRP futures on Binance has fallen to approximately 397 million XRP, its lowest level in more than three months.

XRP Open Interest (Binance). Source: CryptoQuantArab Chain noted that a decline in open interest typically reflects traders closing existing positions or opening fewer new ones. When combined with declining prices, it often signals weaker risk appetite, reduced liquidity and lower leverage across the futures market.

However, the analyst states that the trend is not necessarily bearish.

"In many cases, this phase represents a period of repositioning as investors await a clearer market direction," Arab Chain wrote.

A recovery in both XRP's price and open interest could indicate that liquidity is returning to the market and that a more active trading environment is beginning. On the other hand, continued declines would suggest investors remain cautious.

On the institutional side, US spot XRP ETFs recorded zero flows on Thursday after posting $7.29 million in net outflows on Wednesday, suggesting institutional demand remains subdued.

Bitcoin traded around $64,000 on Friday, with analysts pointing to significant liquidity above current levels that could fuel further upside if bulls maintain momentum.

Notable Statistics:

Coinglass data shows 55,329 traders were liquidated in the past 24 hours for $211.92 million.        SoSoValue data shows net outflows of $95.3 million from spot Bitcoin ETFs on Thursday. Spot Ethereum ETFs saw net outflows of $52.08 million. In the past 24 hours, top gainers include Audiera, DeXe, and MemeCore. Notable Developments:

Trader Notes:

Trader exitpump noted a sizable number of Bitcoin limit short orders were filled as aggressive buyers pushed prices higher.

The analyst warns that if BTC fails to break above $64,500, late long positions could unwind, triggering a pullback as traders exit overcrowded bullish bets.

Trader KillaXBT said Bitcoin has declined roughly 2.5% on nine consecutive Mondays, making next Monday a key session to watch. If BTC continues consolidating near the $64,000 region, it could push toward $65,000–$66,000 before another pullback.

An earlier breakdown could turn Monday’s peak into a lower high, signaling weakening momentum.

CryptoReviewing explained Bitcoin’s sharp swings over the past three days triggered nearly $960 million in crypto liquidations.

BTC first plunged from $64,100 to $61,500, wiping out $628 million in leveraged positions, before rebounding to $63,300 and then rallying above $64,500, liquidating another $332 million combined. The analyst says $64,500–$67,000 holds the next upside liquidity target.

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XRP is finally beginning to show signs of life after weeks of struggling beneath declining resistance and failing to produce any significant momentum. The asset is exhibiting some of the strongest recovery behavior since the start of its most recent decline, though it would be premature to declare this a full-scale bull market reversal. 

The ability of XRP to recover from the late-June lows around $1.00 is the most significant development. Buyers intervened and forced the asset back toward the declining resistance line that has stopped every attempt at a rally over the past month, rather than creating another lower low and prolonging the bearish trend. 

XRP/USDT Chart by TradingViewCurrently, XRP is testing a crucial technical barrier created by the 26-day EMA and the declining trendline at $1.12. This combination creates a crucial decision point for the market. After months of intense pressure, a successful breakout would indicate that sellers are finally losing control. What distinguishes the current move is its natural formation. Classic technical structures like double bottoms, inverse head-and-shoulders patterns, or capitulation spikes give rise to many reversals.

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XRP's recovery is not the same. Simply put, the asset stabilized, stopped declining, and gradually drew buyers back into the market. These reversals are less common because they arise from gradual accumulation rather than a dramatic washout event. The improving outlook is supported by momentum indicators. The RSI has risen above its recent lows and is approaching neutral territory, indicating rising buying interest without entering overbought territory. 

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This allows for additional growth in the event that demand continues to rise. The next significant target is located at $1.17, near the 50-day EMA. A move above that level could reach the psychologically significant $1.25-$1.30 area, where more formidable resistance awaits. 

On the downside, bulls still need to protect the $1.05 area as a crucial support zone. XRP is still in its early stages of recovery. The 200-day and 100-day moving averages are still significantly above the current price, indicating that the overall trend remains negative. However, for the first time in weeks, XRP is giving traders good reason to believe that a more sustainable recovery might be underway.

Shiba Inu's volume injectionAfter one of its most challenging periods this year, Shiba Inu is at last beginning to stabilize. Even though the overall trend is still negative, recent price action suggests that the market might be preparing for a potential comeback, giving investors another reason to pay attention.

After successfully defending local lows set at the end of June, SHIB is currently trading near $0.00000440. The most recent move is notable because the asset has stopped producing aggressive lower lows despite continued pressure from key moving averages. Rather than continuing its downward spiral, Shiba Inu has entered a consolidation phase that may lay the groundwork for a more significant recovery. 

SHIB/USDT Chart by TradingViewWhile the Relative Strength Index rises back toward neutral territory, the chart shows SHIB recovering from oversold conditions. The RSI's slow recovery suggests that selling pressure is easing, even though it remains below the levels typically associated with strong bullish momentum. This shift is often one of the first indicators before a significant trend reversal occurs.

Volume has also improved somewhat during recent recovery attempts. The increase in activity suggests that market participants are beginning to accumulate rather than simply exit positions, even though buyers have not yet generated enough demand to break through significant resistance levels. 

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The cluster of moving averages above the current price remains the main challenge. The first significant resistance level is the 26-day EMA around $0.00000460. A move above it would expose the 50-day EMA around $0.00000480, while a stronger rally could bring the 100-day moving average around $0.00000530 into focus. 

Despite these positive signs, traders should exercise caution. The fact that SHIB is still trading significantly below its long-term 200-day moving average indicates that the broader trend has not yet changed. Recovery hopes are being rekindled, though they have not been fully confirmed. 

Bitcoin must push aboveAlthough Bitcoin's most recent recovery attempt is gaining traction, a significant level still separates the market from a more convincing reversal. Even though Bitcoin has reclaimed short-term support and risen sharply from the sub-$60,000 area, the true test lies higher on the chart. Bitcoin is currently trading at $64,500 and is approaching the 50-day EMA at $65,400. 

Throughout the most recent downturn, this moving average has served as dynamic resistance, rejecting earlier recovery attempts and thwarting bulls' efforts to sustain upside momentum. This level is the key hurdle for Bitcoin at the moment. The recent rally is encouraging, as it follows a successful defense of the $58,000-$60,000 support zone. 

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At local lows, buyers intervened forcefully, pushing Bitcoin higher and lifting the RSI above the neutral 50 level. Momentum is building, and volume has held steady throughout the recovery, indicating genuine demand rather than a transient relief bounce. However, until Bitcoin breaks through the 50-day EMA, the structure remains incomplete. 

A successful move above $65,400 would likely invite additional buying pressure and open the door to the 100-day EMA, located around $69,000. The 200-day moving average around $75,000, which marks the boundary between a long-term bearish and bullish environment, remains the primary target beyond that. A failure at current levels would present a different scenario. 

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Another rejection from the 50-day EMA could reinforce the current downward trend and push Bitcoin back toward the $60,000 support level. While that would not necessarily invalidate the recovery, it would seriously delay any broader reversal. What makes the current setup significant is the absence of major resistance between the 50-day and 100-day moving averages.

If bulls can force a breakout now, momentum could accelerate quickly. Bitcoin does not need a dramatic trend shift or capitulation event to rebound. The $65,400 region must be decisively reclaimed. Until then, the current rally is not evidence of a new bullish trend, but rather a promising recovery attempt.

XRP News: Former SWIFT Exec Denies Integration Rumors, XRPL’s Independent Path Still Bullish?

Japan’s Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama announced at the Open QUICK 2026 seminar, organized by leading financial information provider QUICK on July 10, that the government is progressing as scheduled in the process to legalize crypto asset exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the country. This development follows growing international interest in similar financial products abroad.

Regulatory shift for crypto assetsRecently, Japan’s House of Representatives approved a regulatory change transferring the oversight of spot crypto assets from the Payment Services Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act. This move paves the way for crypto assets to be classified as fully regulated financial products, aligning their legal framework more closely with that of equities and bonds.

Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama confirmed that the government is proceeding with the legalization of crypto asset ETFs as originally intended.

The new regulation strengthens the legal basis for crypto asset ETFs to be listed and traded on Japanese exchanges. Under the current timetable, these products may begin trading on Japan’s markets as early as next year.

SBI develops two innovative fund offeringsIn May, SBI Holdings announced the launch of a new crypto asset ETF. The company’s plans include a dual-asset ETF structure that will provide investors with regulated access to both Bitcoin and XRP. As one of Japan’s largest financial groups, SBI operates across banking, brokerage, and asset management services.

In addition, SBI proposed a hybrid investment fund bringing together gold-based ETFs and crypto asset ETFs. In this structure, 51% of the portfolio would be allocated to gold ETFs, while the remaining 49% would be dedicated to crypto assets such as Bitcoin ETFs. This approach targets more cautious institutional and retail investors seeking diversified exposure.

ProductContentTarget audienceDual-asset ETFBitcoin and XRPInvestors seeking regulated crypto accessHybrid fund51% gold-based ETF, 49% crypto asset ETFMore cautious institutional and retail investorsAmbitious asset growth and competitionSBI aims to reach approximately 5 trillion yen, equivalent to $32 billion in assets under management, within three years of launching these products. This target represents a bold step for crypto-themed investment products within Japan’s financial sector and signals significant anticipated demand.

The company also hopes to secure an early market advantage by moving ahead of major Japanese financial groups such as Nomura and Rakuten Securities. With expanding regulatory clarity, competition in the crypto ETF space in Japan is expected to intensify in the coming period.

Ripple partnership comes to the foreSBI’s inclusion of XRP in its ETF plan aligns with its longstanding corporate partnership with Ripple. Known for its XRP-focused payment solutions, Ripple has established close business relationships in the Japanese market, and this collaboration continues to play a significant strategic role for SBI.

SBI is developing a structure uniting Bitcoin and XRP within the same fund, while also introducing a separate model that combines gold and crypto asset ETFs in a single portfolio.

Through these initiatives, SBI seeks to attract both aggressive crypto investors and more risk-averse clients, offering diverse routes to engage with digital assets under a regulated framework.

Market analysts expect SBI’s pioneering approach and regulatory developments to spur wider adoption of crypto ETFs in Japan, potentially altering the landscape for both institutional and retail participation in the coming years.

As Japan prepares to launch crypto asset ETFs, the convergence of traditional finance and blockchain technology is poised to reshape investment options in the country, with major players vying for leadership in a rapidly evolving sector.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

XRP has once again entered a structural pattern on the higher timeframes that, in the past, has preceded dramatic rallies. Market analyst Crypto Patel notes that XRP has returned to its major accumulation area between $0.70 and $1.10—the same price range where long-term holders historically positioned themselves ahead of previous surges. Technical indicators, derivatives data, and network growth all signal in the same direction, strengthening the case for a potential major move.

Accumulation zone and technical outlook take center stageAccording to Patel, this price band mirrors the area where long-term investors historically bought ahead of XRP’s biggest rallies. CoinCodex data show that XRP is currently trading right at $1.10, sitting at the upper boundary of this critical demand zone. The analyst argues that current price action resembles previous periods of prolonged sideways movement that ultimately gave way to powerful upward trends.

Crypto Patel suggests that if XRP is able to maintain its position within the $0.70 to $1.10 accumulation zone and break above the $3 resistance, historical cycle patterns could bring the $9 level and beyond into play.

On the technical side, the high time frame MACD indicator is also under close watch. In previous cycles, a potential bullish crossover in the MACD has signaled a shift from downward to upward momentum, acting as one of the early indicators of trend reversals.

Quick glossary: The MACD is a technical indicator that measures the relationship between moving averages. A bullish crossover occurs when short-term momentum overtakes the long-term trend, often signaling a potential upward phase.

IndicatorLevelMeaningAccumulation zone$0.70 to $1.10Long-term demand areaCurrent price$1.10Upper band of the rangeKey resistance$3Break could trigger a new cycleLong-term target$9 and aboveHistorical cycle scenarioLeverage unwinds in the derivatives marketThe derivatives landscape has also shifted notably. On Binance, open interest in XRP futures has dropped to around 397 million XRP, marking the lowest level seen in over three months. During the same period, the price receded from approximately $1.55 in March to $1.10.

At first glance, the drop in open interest might signal market weakness. However, such reductions after extended corrections can be seen as a move toward healthier market conditions. Decreased leverage reduces liquidation risks and speculative froth, possibly setting a more stable foundation for price appreciation should new demand arise.

The fall in open interest to 397 million XRP in Binance futures suggests that a significant portion of leveraged traders has exited the market.

Network growth seen as supportive factorOn-chain activity also highlights continued growth in the XRP ecosystem. Approximately 40% of all XRP wallets were created in 2024 and 2025, indicating ongoing inflows of new participants despite the market’s subdued conditions over recent months.

The steady increase in wallet numbers points to a broader user base and a tilt toward long-term holding. Analysts suggest that if the current support area holds and XRP manages to reclaim $3, a fresh expansionary cycle could become a near-term focus for the cryptocurrency.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

20h05 ▪ 6 min read ▪ by Luc Jose A.

Summarize this article with:

XRP-backed ETFs have just experienced their first significant setback in 2026. After months of enthusiasm around crypto-related financial products, the latest figures reveal a clear trend reversal. The capital outflows observed in these funds question the scenario of a seamless institutional adoption for the Ripple ecosystem. This change in dynamics raises questions about the strength of investors’ appetite for altcoins through listed financial vehicles.

In brief XRP ETFs record one of the largest capital outflows of 2026, marking a clear break from the optimism of previous months. Consolidated data confirms massive capital withdrawals, forcing major issuers to urgently liquidate significant market positions. This sudden disengagement is explained by a change in fund managers’ attitudes amid a shifting macroeconomic and regulatory context. The market now awaits to see if this healthy purge will attract new buyers or if it signals a more lasting disenchantment with traditional finance. Factual Data on Outflowing Flows While XRP adoption is progressing on other fronts, weekly reports on institutional fund flows have revealed a historic decline in investor exposure to the Ripple token. Consolidated data from market analyses indicate several major factual elements characterizing this unprecedented financial capitulation :

XRP ETFs recorded one of their largest net capital outflows volumes of the current year, wiping out several months of continuous accumulation in one go ; This massive withdrawal movement was aggressively concentrated on the main global issuers of derivative products ; Managers of these regulated funds had to liquidate significant spot market positions to meet withdrawal demands ; The simultaneity of these massive outflows indicates a deliberate and coordinated choice by wealth managers, eager to drastically reduce their exposure to this specific product. To understand the underlying dynamics of this phenomenon, it is necessary to observe the technical structure of these fund withdrawals. Unlike usual daily fluctuations reflecting simple short-term arbitrages, the financial volume withdrawn this week demonstrates a global risk reassessment by major portfolios.

Fund managers had to face simultaneous withdrawal requests, forcing custodial structures to move massive blocks of XRP out of the ETF collateralization circuits. Financial experts thus point out that such behavior in regulated markets often precedes periods of high volatility on regular exchange platforms. These technical details confirm that the movement is not a mere temporary correction, but rather a major restructuring of asset allocations by top-tier investors.

Why Is Capital Fleeing the Ripple Network? The explanation for this sudden turnaround lies not only in the accounting analysis of flows but finds its roots in a profound change in the macroeconomic and sectoral environment specific to Ripple. Indeed, institutional investors generally react to specific fundamental signals, whether unexpected regulatory changes, interest rate adjustments, or strategic reallocations toward assets considered more resilient in the short term.

This disenchantment with XRP ETFs also coincides with a change in risk appetite among fund managers, who now seem to favor more conservative yield strategies at the expense of high-volatility altcoins. The absence of new immediate growth catalysts for the Ripple network ultimately convinced the most cautious investors to secure their positions outside this financial vehicle.

Another determining factor lies in the fierce competition now taking place among different ETFs in the Web3 market. With the multiplication of available financial products, fund managers are making strict arbitrages, moving capital toward ecosystems that show more convincing network growth metrics or immediate yield prospects.

The temporary lack of clarity on certain aspects of Ripple’s business development may have prompted part of traditional finance to step back, preferring to observe the situation’s evolution from neutral cash positions. This cautious behavior demonstrates that institutional capital loyalty is fleeting and depends on the constant ability to generate trust.

What Are the Consequences for the Future of XRP? The direct consequences of this wave of withdrawals are already being felt across the entire XRP market structure. The reduction in the size of assets under management in ETFs mechanically decreases the available institutional liquidity, which has the effect of amplifying price movements and weakening major technical supports of the token.

Moreover, this disengagement creates a negative signal effect for the traditional finance sector, which could temporarily slow the launch of new derivatives based on secondary cryptos. The drying up of these buying flows deprives the asset of essential support to maintain its upward trajectory, forcing the retail market to absorb alone the residual selling pressure generated by these portfolio restructurings.

In the long term, issuers’ ability to stabilize the situation will determine the viability of these financial instruments for the general public. Should capital outflows persist, some funds might be forced to restructure their offerings or even temporarily suspend the creation of new shares to protect remaining investors.

This would cast a pall over all altcoins aspiring to obtain their own ETFs, demonstrating that regulatory approval alone does not guarantee commercial success or financial flow stability. Market participants will therefore closely watch the reaction of market makers and ecosystem whales to see if an internal buying force can compensate for this institutional void.

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Luc Jose A.

Diplômé de Sciences Po Toulouse et titulaire d'une certification consultant blockchain délivrée par Alyra, j'ai rejoint l'aventure Cointribune en 2019. Convaincu du potentiel de la blockchain pour transformer de nombreux secteurs de l'économie, j'ai pris l'engagement de sensibiliser et d'informer le grand public sur cet écosystème en constante évolution. Mon objectif est de permettre à chacun de mieux comprendre la blockchain et de saisir les opportunités qu'elle offre. Je m'efforce chaque jour de fournir une analyse objective de l'actualité, de décrypter les tendances du marché, de relayer les dernières innovations technologiques et de mettre en perspective les enjeux économiques et sociétaux de cette révolution en marche.

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

XRP spent the first half of 2026 defending the one level that matters, the $1 mark, while a wall of bullish fundamentals, ETF inflows, whale accumulation, and a finished lawsuit failed to move the price. Now a delayed act of Congress has become the single catalyst that could break the deadlock in either direction. This is the level, the tension between fundamentals and price, and the honest case on both sides for the month ahead.

Summary

XRP remains trapped between $1 support and $1.20 resistance as bullish fundamentals struggle to lift the price. Progress on the CLARITY Act could unlock stronger institutional demand, while another delay may pressure the $1 floor. ETF inflows, whale accumulation, Fed policy, and broader crypto sentiment will shape XRP’s direction through July. XRP (XRP) enters July 2026 trading near $1.14, and the number hides a standoff. For months, the token has done something that frustrates every holder watching the headlines: it has absorbed a steady stream of unambiguously bullish news, sustained ETF inflows, tripling whale accumulation, the long legal cloud finally lifted, and gone essentially nowhere, pinned in a range whose floor is the psychologically decisive $1.00 mark. The fundamentals say one thing, and the price says another, and the gap between them is the defining feature of XRP right now.

XRP daily price chart | Source: crypto.news The catalyst that could finally resolve the standoff is not a product or a partnership but a piece of legislation. The market-structure bill that would settle how digital assets like XRP are classified in the United States, and with it the path to spot ETF conversions and deeper institutional access, has slipped from its expected timeline toward late July or August, and its progress or delay has become the swing factor traders are watching above all else. XRP sits, in other words, between a well-defended floor and a legislative catalyst, with fundamentals loaded on one side and a stubborn chart on the other, waiting for something to break the tension.

This prediction maps that standoff the way a trader would: the price levels that define the range, the strange disconnect between XRP’s strong fundamentals and its flat price, the bullish case built on flows and legislation, the bearish case built on the chart and the broader market, the analyst and prediction-market targets worth knowing, and the honest bottom line on a month that could stay boring or break hard. None of it is investment advice, and XRP’s history of violent moves means every level here can be overrun by a single headline.

The levels that matter The map begins and ends with $1.00, because no level on XRP’s chart carries more weight. The token trades near $1.14, and the entire near-term structure organizes around the $1.00 to $1.06 support band, where a large concentration of XRP has accumulated and where buyers have repeatedly defended the line. Holding that band is the whole bullish premise; losing it changes the picture entirely.

On the downside, the immediate support sits around $1.08 to $1.10, the near shelf beneath the current price, and below it the decisive $1.00 to $1.06 zone, the floor whose defense has defined the range for months. A clean break below $1.00 would be more than technical; it would puncture the psychological line the entire holder base watches, and would open a path toward the $0.90 area and, if selling accelerated, the low $0.80s that mark the range’s worst case. Because so much rests on the round number, the reaction at $1.00 is the single most important thing to watch on any decline.

On the upside, the first resistance is the $1.18 to $1.20 area, the ceiling that has repeatedly capped rallies and that prediction markets treat as the key line for the month. Above it, clearing the low $1.20s would signal the range breaking upward, with the next meaningful hurdles near $1.30 and then the $1.50 to $1.65 zone that would mark a genuine trend change after months of grinding. The structure, in short, is a coiled range: a heavily defended floor at $1.00, a stubborn ceiling near $1.20, and a token compressed between them waiting for a catalyst, with the legislative calendar the most likely source of one.

The disconnect: strong fundamentals, flat price The most important thing to understand about XRP right now is why it is not higher, because the bullish fundamentals are real and the flat price is the puzzle. Consider what has accumulated on the positive side of the ledger. Spot XRP ETFs have drawn sustained inflows over a multi-week stretch, real institutional money entering through the creation-and-redemption machinery that turns inflows into spot buying.

Whale accumulation has intensified, with large-wallet activity and exchange outflows rising sharply as big holders move coins into storage, the same accumulation-into-weakness pattern visible across the majors, the tradable float on exchanges falling toward multi-year lows. The legal uncertainty that shadowed XRP for years has resolved. And Ripple has continued stacking institutional wins across payments and custody. By the usual logic, this combination should have driven a substantial move, and it has not.

The explanation is partly that XRP does not trade in isolation. It remains correlated with the broader crypto market, and that market spent the first half of 2026 in a significant drawdown driven by the Federal Reserve and risk-off flows, the same macro pressure that pulled Bitcoin from the $90,000s toward $60,000.

In that environment, XRP’s token-specific tailwinds were fighting a market-wide headwind, and the result was a standoff: the bullish flows defended the floor while the bearish macro capped the ceiling, producing exactly the compressed range the chart shows. It is also partly that the market is waiting for the one catalyst that converts XRP’s fundamental progress into a structural demand shift, the legislative clarity that would unlock the next wave of institutional access, and until that arrives, the accumulated fundamentals sit as stored potential rather than realized price. The disconnect, in other words, is not evidence the bull case is wrong; it is evidence the bull case is waiting for a trigger the calendar has delayed.

The bullish case: flows, float, and the CLARITY catalyst The case for an upside break rests on three reinforcing pillars. The first is the flow-and-float dynamic. Sustained ETF inflows represent real buying, and they are meeting a shrinking available supply as whales pull coins off exchanges into storage, a classic setup where steady demand meets contracting float and price becomes increasingly sensitive to any demand shock. If the accumulation continues and the float keeps thinning, the conditions for a sharp move higher build quietly beneath the flat price, needing only a catalyst to ignite.

The second pillar is that catalyst: the market-structure legislation. If the bill advances on its revised timeline, it would settle XRP’s regulatory classification in the United States and clear the path for spot ETF conversions and the deeper institutional participation that a defined legal status unlocks, the classification fight whose stakes reach across the entire market.

Because so much of XRP’s institutional demand is gated behind that clarity, its arrival is the specific event that could convert the stored fundamental potential into realized price, and the market’s attention to the legislative calendar reflects exactly that.

The third pillar is seasonal and technical: July has historically been one of XRP’s stronger months, and a token compressed against a defended floor with thinning float is structurally primed for an upside move if any catalyst breaks the range. Combine continued flows, a legislative green light, and favorable seasonality, and the bullish path toward the $1.20 ceiling and beyond becomes credible.

What the legislation would actually change Because the entire bull case pivots on the market-structure bill, it is worth being precise about what its passage would and would not do, since the market’s fixation on it can blur into vagueness. The bill’s core function is classification: it would define whether a digital asset like XRP is treated as a commodity or a security under United States law, and assign clear jurisdiction between regulators accordingly. That sounds technical, and its consequences are concrete.

A definitive commodity-style classification would remove the regulatory overhang that has kept many institutions on the sidelines, clear the path for spot ETF products and their conversions to proceed without legal ambiguity, and let banks, asset managers, and payment institutions engage with XRP under rules they can actually follow instead of guessing at.

The reason this matters so much for XRP specifically is that XRP’s investment thesis is unusually institutional. Its core use case runs through payments, cross-border settlement, and the regulated financial institutions Ripple has spent a decade courting, which means XRP’s demand is gated behind regulatory clarity to a degree that more retail-driven assets are not.

A bank cannot build on an asset whose legal status is undefined, and much of the accumulated fundamental progress, the custody deals, the payment integrations, the institutional partnerships, converts into actual token demand only once the classification question is settled. 

This is why the legislation functions as the swing factor: it is not just another headline but the specific key that unlocks the demand the other fundamentals have been building toward. It is also why a delay hurts more than it would for most tokens, because the stored potential cannot be realized until the gate opens, and every slip in the timeline extends the standoff the chart reflects.

Two caveats keep the analysis honest. First, legislative outcomes are binary and uncertain: the bill could advance, stall, or pass in a weakened form, and the market’s apparent assumption that clarity eventually arrives is a bet, not a certainty.

Second, even favorable passage would not produce instant demand; institutional adoption moves on quarterly timelines, through risk committees and compliance reviews, so the price effect of clarity would likely build over months instead of spiking on the announcement, the same slow procedural cadence that governs every institution’s entry into the asset.

The catalyst is real, in other words, but its payoff is a curve, not a switch, which matters for anyone expecting a single legislative headline to resolve the standoff overnight.

The fundamentals beneath the token It is worth grounding the bull case in the specific fundamental progress that has accumulated, because the disconnect between that progress and the flat price is the month’s central puzzle. On the institutional side, Ripple has continued building the payments and custody business that gives XRP its distinctive use case, adding banking relationships and settlement integrations that deepen the token’s role in cross-border flows.

On the product side, the regulated stablecoin in Ripple’s ecosystem has grown into a meaningful settlement instrument, and the broader infrastructure around XRP, custody, tokenization, and institutional rails has matured steadily. On the market-structure side, the arrival of spot ETFs gave regulated capital a compliant path into XRP for the first time, and their sustained inflows are the clearest evidence that the demand is real.

The bearish counter to all of this is not that the fundamentals are fake but that they are already priced, or that they matter less than the market believes for a token whose price is ultimately set by supply, demand, and macro sentiment like any other.

A skeptic notes that XRP has a large supply, that some of the accumulated demand may be offset by steady selling from long-term holders and scheduled releases, and that fundamental progress has repeatedly failed to translate into price, which at some point becomes evidence about the relationship itself, not a temporary lag.

Both readings are live, and the honest synthesis is that XRP’s fundamentals have built a loaded setup whose realization depends on a catalyst and a cooperative macro, neither of which the token controls, which is exactly why the price sits where it does: potential energy waiting for a trigger, in a market not yet ready to price it.

The bearish case: the chart and the market The case for continued weakness, or a downside break, is equally grounded. The first and simplest bearish point is that the range has held for months and the burden of proof is on the bulls: XRP has repeatedly failed to clear the $1.18 to $1.20 ceiling, and a token that cannot break resistance despite a wall of good news is a token whose buyers are exhausted at those levels, which often precedes a move down rather than up.

The disconnect between fundamentals and price cuts both ways, and the bearish reading is that if this much good news cannot lift the price, the selling pressure, much of it from the same steady supply the market must absorb, is stronger than the bulls admit.

The second bearish point is the macro and the legislative risk itself. XRP’s correlation with the broader market means a weak crypto tape, driven by a hawkish Federal Reserve at its late-July meeting or renewed risk-off flows, would pressure XRP regardless of its own fundamentals, and the same drawdown that capped the first half could extend into the summer.

The legislative catalyst is also a double-edged sword: a further delay, a watering-down of the bill, or a disappointing outcome would remove the very trigger the bull case depends on, and a market that has priced in eventual clarity could sell the disappointment, breaking the $1.00 floor and opening the path toward $0.90 and the low $0.80s. The bearish scenario, in short, is that the range resolves downward, either because the macro drags XRP with the market or because the awaited catalyst slips again and disappoints a market tired of waiting.

Three scenarios for July Pulling the forces together produces three coherent paths for the month, organized around the two levels and the one catalyst.

The base case is the range holding. If the legislation stays in limbo and the macro neither rescues nor crushes risk assets, XRP most likely continues to grind between the $1.00 to $1.06 floor and the $1.18 to $1.20 ceiling, defending the round number on dips and stalling at resistance on rallies, exactly the compression that has defined recent months. This is the highest-probability path absent a catalyst, and it resolves only when the legislation or the macro forces a break.

The bullish scenario needs the catalyst. Advancement of the market-structure bill on its revised timeline, ideally alongside a stable-to-positive crypto tape and continued ETF inflows, could break XRP above the $1.20 ceiling, turn the thinning float into a demand-shock accelerant, and open the path toward $1.30 and the $1.50 to $1.65 trend-change zone. Favorable July seasonality adds a tailwind. This is the path the accumulated fundamentals have been building toward, and it activates on a legislative green light.

The bearish scenario breaks the floor. A hawkish Federal Reserve dragging the whole market down, a renewed risk-off wave, or, most pointedly, another legislative delay or a disappointing outcome could puncture the $1.00 line, trigger the psychological break the entire holder base watches, and open the path toward $0.90 and the low $0.80s. The cruelest version is the catalyst itself disappointing, since a market that has waited months for clarity could sell the letdown hard.

The targets on the table The forecasts around XRP span an unusually wide range, reflecting the genuine uncertainty of a token waiting on legislation. Prediction-market data leans cautious for the short term, with traders assigning strong odds, around 70%, to XRP closing above $1.20 on the relevant horizon, meaningful odds of a close below $1.00, and only a small probability of a move to $2 or above in the near window, a spread that captures the market’s sense of a range more likely to hold than to break dramatically either way.

On the analyst side, one major bank cut its XRP forecast sharply, from $8 to $2.80, framing the reduction as a return to realism rather than a loss of faith, while maintaining a substantially higher longer-dated target, and the range of published targets runs from sub-$1 bearish cases through low-single-digit base cases to the double-digit forecasts that depend on full institutional adoption playing out.

The spread from a sub-$1 downside to double-digit bull cases is the honest picture, and it maps directly onto the legislative binary: the bullish targets largely assume the market-structure clarity arrives and unlocks institutional demand, while the bearish ones assume continued delay and macro pressure.

For July specifically, the levels matter more than the price targets: the realistic range centers on the $1.00 floor and the $1.20 ceiling, with a break of either level the signal that the standoff has resolved, and the far targets in both directions activating only if the range genuinely breaks.

What to watch as the month unfolds For a reader tracking XRP through July, the signals worth monitoring are specific and mostly public. The legislative calendar sits at the top: any concrete movement on the market-structure bill, a committee vote, a floor schedule, a revised timeline, is the highest-impact news the token can receive, and its absence is itself information, since continued silence extends the standoff. 

The $1.00 line is the second signal, and its behavior on any decline, whether buyers defend it as they have for months or whether it finally gives way, will tell more about the token’s near-term direction than any headline. The $1.20 ceiling is the mirror: a decisive close above it on volume would signal the range breaking upward before most forecasts caught up.

Beneath the levels, three flow-and-context series carry the real story. ETF flows are the clearest demand gauge, and a sustained acceleration or reversal there would move the odds materially. Exchange-reserve and whale-wallet data show whether the float keeps thinning, the quiet structural setup beneath the flat price.

And the broader crypto tape, driven by the same Federal Reserve meeting that dominates the Bitcoin outlook, is the macro backdrop that can override XRP’s own fundamentals in either direction. A reader who watches the legislative calendar, the two levels, and those three series has the full dashboard, and is positioned to interpret the month as it happens instead of reacting to it after the fact. XRP has spent months as a coiled spring; the value of the dashboard is that it shows, in real time, which way the spring is finally releasing.

The honest bottom line XRP’s July 2026 is a coiled spring waiting for a trigger, and the trigger is on a calendar the market does not control. The token enters the month with genuinely bullish fundamentals, sustained ETF inflows, intensifying whale accumulation, thinning float, and resolved legal risk, all of which have failed to lift it out of a range because a market-wide drawdown has capped it and because the one catalyst that would convert fundamentals into price, legislative clarity, keeps slipping. The result is a compressed range between a heavily defended $1.00 floor and a stubborn $1.20 ceiling, most likely holding until either the legislation advances or the macro forces a break.

The single most useful thing to watch is the legislative calendar, because it is the swing factor that dwarfs the others: advancement toward the revised late-July or August timeline is the specific event that could ignite the accumulated fundamentals, while another delay or a disappointing outcome is the specific risk that could break the floor.

Beneath that, the $1.00 line is the number that matters; its defense the bull case intact and its failure the bear case realized. XRP has spent months proving that good news alone will not move it; July’s question is whether the one piece of news it is actually waiting for finally arrives, and honestly, the calendar, not any forecast, will answer it.

A closing word on the disconnect that runs through this entire outlook, because it is the most important thing for a holder to internalize. It can be maddening to watch a token absorb clearly good news and refuse to move, and the temptation is to conclude either that the news is meaningless or that the price is broken. Neither is quite right. What XRP is demonstrating is the difference between fundamental progress and the specific trigger that prices it, and for an asset whose demand is gated behind regulation, that trigger is legislative, binary, and outside anyone’s control.

The accumulated fundamentals are not wasted; they are stored, and stored potential is exactly what produces the sharp moves that follow long compressions, in either direction. The month ahead is less a question of whether XRP’s fundamentals are good, they are, than of whether the one catalyst they are waiting for finally arrives, and the discipline the situation demands is the patience to watch the calendar and the levels, not the noise, and to let the range’s eventual break, whenever and whichever way it comes, be the signal that the waiting is over.

XRP has been here before, coiled and waiting, and its history is one of long dormancy punctuated by moves that arrive without warning and travel far before anyone adjusts. That history counsels neither confidence nor despair, only readiness: the setup is loaded, the trigger is identified, and the timing belongs to a calendar in Washington, not a chart in a trading app.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile, and you can lose your entire investment. Price levels, forecasts, and the status and timing of pending legislation reflect information current as of July 9, 2026, and are subject to change; verify current conditions before making any decision. Always do your own research.

XRP, the digital asset developed by Ripple Labs for cross-border payments, has come under renewed selling pressure as derivatives traders turn increasingly bearish. Binance, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, now reports funding rates for XRP at some of the most negative levels seen in recent months. The shift reflects a consensus among traders who are betting on further declines in the token’s price.

Bearish sentiment intensifies in derivatives marketRecent data from Binance shows that over a 30-day period, XRP’s funding rates have sunk into deep negative territory, indicating more traders are taking short positions. Funding rates serve as an indicator for market sentiment in perpetual futures trading by measuring whether traders in long or short positions are paying to hold those trades.

Analyst Darkfost commented that persistent negative rates demonstrate a clear change in outlook among derivatives traders, who now overwhelmingly expect lower prices for XRP in the near term. He pointed out that this bearish bias has remained in place since the start of the year, reflecting sustained uncertainty among market participants.

XRP funding rates have reached extreme bearish levels following a 70% price drop from its July 2025 peak, reinforcing negative sentiment across the altcoin market and showing traders’ widespread expectation of further declines.

History shows that periods of deeply negative funding rates may precede market reversals, as seen in April 2025, when XRP fell to $1.25 before recovering in a 126% rally. However, analysts caution that every cycle presents different dynamics, and traders remain alert to whether a similar turnaround could occur.

Market cap and open interest signal cautious outlookAlongside extreme funding rates, open interest for XRP futures has dropped to $350.6 million, marking one of the lowest levels in recent months. Open interest tracks the total value of outstanding futures contracts and serves as an indicator of leverage and overall market engagement. The current decline suggests that many leveraged traders are reducing or closing their positions rather than initiating new bets.

Meanwhile, market capitalization for XRP has contracted to $10.89 billion. Analyst Pelinay noted that the shrinking market cap aligns with falling open interest, highlighting limited appetite among investors to hold or accumulate XRP at current price levels.

The NVT (Network Value to Transactions) ratio remains elevated at 162.86, indicating that XRP’s network activity has not grown sufficiently to support its market valuation. High NVT ratios can signal overvaluation when compared to actual on-chain use, raising concerns about the token’s current pricing relative to transaction volume.

Taken together, these signals point to a market where demand is subdued and risk exposure is being trimmed. As sellers maintain pressure, traders are keeping a close eye for any shift that could trigger a potential rebound.

MetricCurrent ValueRecent TrendXRP Funding Rate (Binance)Extremely negativeDecreasingOpen Interest (XRP Futures)$350.6 millionDecreasingMarket Cap (XRP)$10.89 billionDecreasingNVT Ratio162.86ElevatedXRP’s move contrasts with about 40% of altcoins, many of which now trade near their all-time lows. Despite losing nearly 70% since its peak of $2.45 in July 2025, XRP remains above its historical minimum, though the trend in metrics such as funding rates and open interest shows traders expect more downside.

Derivatives traders remain deeply pessimistic about XRP as open interest and market cap decline, while network activity continues to lag and sellers keep downward pressure on prices.

Mini dictionary: Funding rate — In cryptocurrency futures, the funding rate is a periodic payment exchanged between long and short position holders depending on the difference between perpetual contract prices and spot market prices. Extreme negative rates indicate that traders holding short positions are paying those in long positions, reflecting heavy bearish sentiment.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Cover image via U.Today Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.

According to recent data from Ripple Stablecoin Tracker, Ripple USD (RLUSD) supply on the Ethereum network has shrunk to about $692 million as Ripple continues to adjust the stablecoin's circulating supply through token burns.

At the start of July, RLUSD supply on Ethereum was above $727 million; now this figure has decreased, with millions in Ripple USD burned on the Ethereum network in the last seven days.

$115.4 million was burned on the Ethereum blockchain in the last seven days as seen on the Ripple Stablecoin Tracker website, while $49.3 million was minted in the same timeframe. On July 29 alone, $25.9 million was burned on the Ethereum blockchain while $6.2 million in RLUSD was minted.

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The last 30 days saw significant RLUSD redemptions on the Ethereum blockchain; a total of $369.4 million was burned while $167.6 million was minted.

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On the XRP Ledger, a total of $324.1 million was minted in the last 30 days and $217.6 million was burned. The total circulating supply of the RLUSD stablecoin is currently $1.556 billion.

RLUSD expands footprint on XRP LedgerWith RLUSD supply on Ethereum shrinking to $692 million, XRP Ledger remains ahead, hosting more RLUSD than Ethereum network. RLUSD's footprint on XRP has increased significantly, overtaking Ethereum supply for the first time in June.

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RLUSD in circulation on the XRP Ledger grew from roughly $20 million at the end of 2024 to about $800 million by late June 2026, which is a 40-fold rise, with the largest increase occurring in May and June 2026.

Ripple USD is currently one of the most-traded issued assets on XRP. Its share of all on-chain trading climbed from under 1% to about 12% in 2026, and the RLUSD/XRP pair alone has cleared roughly $900 million over the last six months.

This week, Ripple received authorization of its Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license from Luxembourg's Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF). The authorization confirms Ripple as fully MiCA-compliant, with its solutions underpinned by XRP and RLUSD made available to financial institutions, corporates and businesses across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area.

XRP price climbed 1.27% to $1.10 as the wider cryptocurrency market recorded renewed gains during active Friday trading. Bitcoin price rose 1.48% to $64,002, while Ethereum advanced 3.03% to $1,790. 

The overall crypto market rose by 1.54% to reach 2.19 trillion. The focus now shifts to the CLARITY Act in July.

CLARITY Act Moves Closer to Senate Action H.R. 3633 was passed by the House on July 17, 2025 and received 294 votes in support. Another 134 representatives opposed the measure.

The bill intends to have a national framework on the trading, supervision, and protection of digital assets. It also divides regulatory duties between the SEC and CFTC.

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the proposal on May 14, 2026, through a 15-9 vote. That vote brought the bill further towards Senate action.

In the case of XRP, increased regulation might lessen ambiguity regarding the classification of tokens and trading. An increased legal certainty can lead to institutional participation also.

July Timeline Could Drive XRP Price Momentum The Senate comes out of recess on July 13, which is another procedural action opportunity. However, lawmakers still face disagreements over important provisions.

Discussions involve ethics restrictions, stablecoin rewards, federal preemption, and anti-money-laundering requirements. Such problems may postpone a final vote or oblige changes.

A procedural vote may occur between July 13 and July 17. House-Senate reconciliation can occur during July 20-24.

In case both chambers vote in favour of the same text, the bill might end up in the hands of President Donald Trump before August. The loss of that window would delay till September.

🚨 #CLARITY Act Faces Fresh Scrutiny

Senate Democrats are calling for hearings into President #Trump’s crypto holdings, arguing his reported #crypto earnings raise conflict-of-interest concerns ahead of the expected release of the #CLARITYAct draft.

The ethics provision remains… pic.twitter.com/CLpnbnZcwG

— CoinGape (@CoinGapeMedia) July 10, 2026

A successful Senate push may strengthen XRP confidence this month. Nevertheless, the direction of prices will be determined by the market volume, stability of Bitcoin, and the resistance in the vicinity. Favourable development would appeal to purchasers of regulatory confidence.

XRP Price Outlook: Can Bulls Break Above $2 This Month? The price of XRP was trading close to $1.1013 on Friday after receiving support at about $1.07. The four-hour chart depicts that buyers are back but the momentum is still weak below the resistance level of $1.12.

The relative strength index stood at 47.48, which is slightly below the 50 mark of neutrality. 

The MACD histogram became positive at 0.0018, indicating that bearish pressure might be declining. The MACD line has also crossed the signal line, indicating a potential recovery effort. 

Tradingview An established break over $1.12 may pave the way to the next resistance at $1.15. Further purchases above $1.15 will put the $1.20 level into reach. 

Conversely, the downside is that $1.07 is the most important level that safeguards XRP against a further fall. The next target might be seen at $1.05, with a four-hour low below that support. Continued selling may then pull XRP price toward the psychological $1.00 level.

XRP ETF Assets Near $1 Billion as Cumulative Inflows Hit $1.48 Billion According to SoSoValue data, XRP exchange-traded products showed no net inflows in a single day on July 9. Cumulative inflows were also at $1.48 billion with total net assets standing at $989.46 million. Bitwise dominated the market as the market leader with net assets of $308.15 million. 

Source: Sosovalue data Canary trailed by $252.97 million, followed by Franklin at $249.54 million. The aggregate trading value was $6.87 million, indicating a low turnover in XRP products.

Circle, the issuer of USDC, one of the largest stablecoins in the cryptocurrency market, has received final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national custodial bank.

Accordingly, Circle announced that it has received final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a federal deposit bank called Circle National Trust.

This development follows the conditional approval the company received approximately seven months ago. It is seen as a significant step strengthening Circle’s position in the US financial system.

Circle announced that the bank’s name is “First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A.- Circle National Trust Bank” and that it will operate under the name “Circle National Trust”.

Circle states that this approval brings USDC custody operations under federal regulation. The national custodian bank to be established under this approval will initially only provide custody services to Circle’s affiliates. This will allow Circle to manage the security and operational processes of its digital assets more effectively within its own organization.

Circle also added that the bank aims to take over the management of US dollar reserves backing the USDC stablecoin in the future.

Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said, “The OCC’s approval to establish Circle National Trust represents a decisive step toward bringing blockchain technology and digital assets to the heart of the U.S. financial system. Federal oversight of our trust bank sets a new standard for transparency, governance, and scalability for Circle’s infrastructure and paves the way for a new phase of adoption where leading financial institutions can operate on public blockchains with clarity and confidence.”

As you may recall, Circle submitted its application to the OCC last June and received conditional approval in December.

Ripple has received conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for Ripple National Trust Bank, but has not yet received final approval.

*This is not investment advice.

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@Grayscale has assigned $XRP a single, defining identity: global payments. In a breakdown of what each major crypto asset is actually built for, the world's largest digital asset manager gave Bitcoin the "digital money" label, Ethereum the "world computer" designation, and Solana "high performance." XRP got global payments.

It is a pointed classification. Rather than grouping $XRP alongside smart contract platforms or store-of-value assets, Grayscale has placed it squarely in the cross-border settlement lane, the very use case Ripple has been pushing since the company was founded in 2012.

A Utility Case, Not a Speculation Story Grayscale has categorised $XRP under the "Global Payments" investment narrative, highlighting its role in cross-border payments and digital financial infrastructure. The framing matters because it moves the conversation away from price speculation and toward institutional utility, which is where Ripple has long argued XRP belongs.

XRP focuses on fast, low-cost cross-border payments for financial institutions. Regulatory clarity in the United States has meaningfully boosted its utility and adoption potential. As a result, banks and payment providers increasingly view it as viable settlement infrastructure.

There is a broader narrative developing around XRP as one of the few cryptocurrencies with a clearly identifiable real-world use case. While many digital assets remain heavily dependent on speculation or meme-driven momentum, XRP's value proposition is directly linked to cross-border settlement and liquidity management.

Institutional Adoption Already UnderwayThe Grayscale label arrives as real-world adoption continues to build. XRP now underpins cross-border payments for over 300 institutions in 45 countries, with Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin and BNY Mellon custody deepening institutional adoption.

XRP operates on the XRP Ledger, known for its speed, with transactions finalising in three to five seconds. If a business wants to pay a supplier abroad, dollars are converted into XRP, sent across the globe in seconds, and converted into the destination currency on the other end.

Grayscale's GXRP product allows investors to gain exposure to XRP directly in investment accounts, alongside traditional assets, and is built and managed by Grayscale, the world's largest digital asset-focused investment platform with over a decade of experience operating crypto investment vehicles.

For $XRP, the Grayscale classification is less a revelation than a formal endorsement of the argument its backers have always made. One of the biggest names in institutional crypto asset management is now saying it out loud: XRP is a payments asset, not a speculative one.

Sources
Grayscale XRP Trust ETF (GXRP) - Grayscale
XRP in 2026: Ripple, ETFs, Regulation and Institutional Growth - IG International
Grayscale Names 8 Crypto With Key Narratives Right Now - BeInCrypto

Analysts at Watcher Guru, a US-based cryptocurrency and whale tracking platform, say that due to changing market conditions, it seems unlikely that XRP will repeat its 500% surge.

As is known, XRP experienced one of the most remarkable price increases in the market in 2024. Trading at around $0.50 in July 2024, XRP rose to approximately $2.40 by the end of the year, gaining nearly 500% in value in six months.

This strong performance has generated significant profits for investors, making XRP one of the key altcoins in the market once again.

At that time, Bitcoin also surpassed $100,000 for the first time, boosting the cryptocurrency market in general, including XRP. Analysts at this point noted that this rise in XRP and the market was largely driven by expectations of US President Donald Trump’s re-election and moderate policies supporting cryptocurrencies.

However, analysts argue that current conditions are very different from those supporting the 2024 rally. Global economic uncertainties, geopolitical risks stemming from US-Iran tensions, and a more cautious approach from investors are among the factors limiting optimism in the crypto market.

It is also argued that global capital is now concentrated in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, which is causing other asset classes, such as cryptocurrencies, to underperform.

In conclusion, analysts argue that while a 500% increase in XRP by the end of 2026 is theoretically possible, the 2024 surge may be behind us due to changing market conditions. They believe that the gloomy market sentiment makes a repeat of the 2024 surge in 2026 highly unlikely.

*This is not investment advice.

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The crypto market is going through a quiet phase, but many analysts believe this is when long-term opportunities are created. Crypto Coins continue to be an area of interest as institutional adoption is rising, governments are introducing clearer regulations, and blockchain networks are seeing record usage despite prices remaining below previous highs. Instead of chasing hype, one analyst says the market is focusing on projects with growing adoption, strong revenue, expanding ecosystems, and real-world utility. 

Here are 10 cryptocurrencies that stand out in 2026.1. Bitcoin (BTC)Bitcoin remains the foundation of every crypto portfolio because its supply is permanently limited to 21 million coins. 

The analyst says BTC is currently in an accumulation phase as institutions continue buying through spot ETFs and corporate treasury allocations. It remains the largest cryptocurrency and is widely seen as digital gold. Even though this list focuses on altcoins, most experts still recommend holding Bitcoin as the safest long-term crypto investment.2. Ethereum (ETH)Ethereum continues to dominate smart contracts and remains Wall Street’s preferred blockchain. 

According to Galaxy Digital VP of Research Lucas Outumuro, Ethereum’s biggest strengths are its credibility, security, Layer-2 scaling, privacy upgrades, and future quantum-resistant roadmap.Why @Uptodatenow flipped from ETH skeptic to ETH bull:

"Credibly neutral settlement layer: the world needs that. Demand exists."

"Right technical direction: ZK scaling, quantum resistance, privacy. L2s not dead, Robinhood, Arbitrum prove it."

"I used to be very skeptical of… pic.twitter.com/WbwAmAcslv

— The Rollup (@therollupco) July 8, 2026 Ethereum is also benefiting from growing institutional adoption. Robinhood recently launched its own Layer-2 network using Ethereum technology, while tokenized real-world assets and stablecoins continue expanding on the network. 3. Solana (SOL)Solana is becoming one of the fastest-growing blockchain ecosystems. 

Developers continue choosing Solana for payments, consumer apps, gaming, DeFi, and tokenized assets thanks to its high speed and low transaction costs.Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz recently described Solana as a “global Silicon Valley” for blockchain developers, where entrepreneurs can build products without worrying about scaling issues. The network also continues attracting major institutions through tokenized asset projects.4. Uniswap (UNI)Uniswap remains the largest decentralized exchange and continues benefiting from rising DeFi adoption. 

One of its biggest catalysts this year is its partnership with Robinhood, bringing decentralized trading closer to mainstream investors.The protocol continues generating strong fee revenue while expanding its services across multiple Layer-2 networks, making UNI one of the strongest DeFi projects heading into the next market cycle.5. Cardano (ADA)Although Cardano has received criticism over the past few years, analysts believe the project remains undervalued. 

Founder Charles Hoskinson recently argued that Cardano’s ecosystem continues growing steadily through research-driven development and new innovations instead of copying competing blockchains.The network is also expanding governance features, decentralized applications, and developer activity, keeping ADA among the largest blockchain ecosystems.6. Chainlink (LINK)Chainlink continues to strengthen its position as the leading blockchain oracle network. 

Founder Sergey Nazarov said recent U.S. crypto legislation, including the GENIUS Act and the proposed CLARITY Act, will increase demand for Chainlink’s infrastructure.The network provides proof-of-reserves, cross-chain interoperability, and data services for stablecoins and tokenized assets. As banks and institutions tokenize more real-world assets, analysts expect Chainlink to play an increasingly important role.7. Bittensor (TAO)Artificial intelligence remains one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors, and Bittensor (TAO) is widely viewed as its leading project. 

According to Early crypto investor Michael Terpin, top AI tokens could outperform Bitcoin over the next few years as AI adoption continues accelerating.Bittensor allows developers to build decentralized AI networks while rewarding contributors through blockchain incentives. As AI investment grows globally, TAO is becoming one of the sector’s biggest beneficiaries.8. Hyperliquid (HYPE)Hyperliquid has become one of 2026’s biggest success stories. 

The decentralized perpetual futures exchange processed over $1.34 trillion in trading volume during the first half of the year while generating more than $320 million in protocol revenue.Moreover, the project recently entered the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETF, replacing Avalanche, showing growing institutional interest. The analyst also sees future regulated trading products and institutional participation could drive further growth for Hyperliquid.9. Sui (SUI)Sui continues attracting developers through its high-performance blockchain architecture. 

The network focuses on payments, gaming, AI applications, decentralized finance, and scalable infrastructure.Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng says Sui offers the technology needed to support large-scale on-chain financial applications while handling much higher throughput than many existing blockchains. Its rapidly growing ecosystem keeps it among the top Layer-1 projects to watch.10. XRPXRP remains one of the most hot cryptocurrencies as Ripple expands its global payments business. 

The company continues growing its stablecoin ecosystem, tokenized asset services, and partnerships with financial institutions.With clearer U.S. regulations gradually taking shape and Ripple increasing its focus on cross-border payments and tokenization, the analyst thinks XRP could benefit from broader institutional adoption over the coming years. Story Ends Here

Trust with CoinPedia:CoinPedia has been delivering accurate and timely cryptocurrency and blockchain updates since 2017. All content is created by our expert panel of analysts and journalists, following strict Editorial Guidelines based on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Every article is fact-checked against reputable sources to ensure accuracy, transparency, and reliability. Our review policy guarantees unbiased evaluations when recommending exchanges, platforms, or tools. We strive to provide timely updates about everything crypto & blockchain, right from startups to industry majors.

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'Not Happening': Former SWIFT Exec Shuts Down XRP Integration Rumors

XRP has been looking weak lately, with activity across the board slowing down. In fact, traders aren’t as willing to take on new positions as they were, with demand yet to push up again too.

Here’s what you need to know.

XRP OI falls as demand takes a hit XRP’s Open interest across all exchanges fell to around $773.5 million; that’s a huge drop from levels above $1 billion in May.

Source: Cryptoquant On Binance alone, the OI fell to nearly $350.6 million. So, it’s clear that leveraged traders may be reducing exposure.

Source: Cryptoquant Lower Open Interest may help reduce some liquidation-based pressure, but there hasn’t been enough participation. XRP’s market cap fell to about $10.89 billion too, so new capital is not entering the market either.

Meanwhile, the NVT ratio being elevated impied that network activity was yet to be strong enough for recovery.

Exchange reserves fall too Binance reserves fell to around 2.62 billion XRP as well. There’s not enough tokens available to sell.

Source: Cryptoquant In theory, lower exchange reserves can help sell-side pressure in the short-term. However, the fall does not mean investors are buying, or that a price recovery could be close.

For now, there’s limited support. Buyers may need to return in strength before the trend improves.

And they’re not being matched by whale activity…

XRP saw a 1.8% rise in Thursday’s trading, surpassing the $1.10 threshold. The cryptocurrency reached an intraday low of $1.0827 and peaked at $1.1065 before consolidating in a narrow range between $1.1020 and $1.1040.

Trading volume surged overnightThe uptick gained momentum in the early morning hours. Trading volume spiked to 43.51 million XRP, marking an increase of roughly 88% compared to the 24-hour average. In the following hour, 14.17 million XRP changed hands as the price moved from $1.0958 to $1.1052. After reaching this level, selling pressure began to build.

Analyst Celal Küçüker reminded investors that XRP posted gains of over 500% in just one month two years ago, arguing that the possibility of hitting $7 by year-end should not be ruled out prematurely.

This outlook reflects the growing optimism among retail investors in recent days. Activity in futures markets also supports this sentiment. According to CoinGlass data, open interest in perpetual XRP contracts increased from 2.09 billion to 2.14 billion XRP as of Tuesday.

Glossary: Open interest represents the total number of outstanding futures contracts that have not yet been settled. An increase in this figure signals new capital or new positions entering the market, but it does not alone indicate market direction.

Institutional sentiment remains cautiousWhile retail participation is gradually recovering, institutional investors appear less enthusiastic. On Wednesday, spot XRP ETF outflows totaled around $7 billion. The generally weak flow of funds throughout the week reinforced this cautious stance.

Market caution is not limited to cryptocurrencies. Escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East have also weighed on risk appetite. On Wednesday, US forces launched strikes on 90 targets along the Iranian coastline. In response, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard targeted US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain. Qatar’s Prime Minister has since called for a diplomatic resolution between the parties.

Key technical levels take center stageFrom a technical perspective, XRP continues to trade below major exponential moving averages. The 50-day average stands at $1.17, the 100-day at $1.28, and the 200-day at $1.49. This pattern suggests short-term upward attempts may face resistance.

Analysts remain divided on XRP’s next direction. While some project a move toward the $1.19 to $1.23 range based on Elliott Wave analysis, others warn that falling below $1.09 could trigger a test of deeper support zones. The Relative Strength Index hovers around 45, while the MACD histogram shows a slight positive divergence.

Throughout Thursday’s session, XRP formed higher lows and attracted buying interest near $1.0880 during pullbacks. In the short term, the $1.10 price level is seen as a key support, while resistance is expected at $1.1065, $1.11, and $1.13.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Former SWIFT executive denies XRP integration rumors

Table of contents

XRP’s quiet consolidation ended abruptly Thursday evening. A burst of buy orders in the final hours of the session pushed the token clean through the $1.10 resistance that had held price in check for weeks. The move was a direct challenge to a level that repeatedly rejected upside attempts, and it shifted the near-term structure in a way that places the onus squarely on sellers now.

According to the market update from CoinDesk, XRP closed the day with a 2% gain, landing firmly above $1.10 for the first time since mid-June. The volume that accompanied the breakout was the real story. Earlier trading had been thin and directionless, but the late spike concentrated enough size to overwhelm resting offers and turn a tentative push into a legitimate range breach.

Breaking the range $1.10 was not just a round number. It functioned as an upper boundary for XRP’s price since late June, capping multiple intraday rallies. Each touch triggered a sell-off, reinforcing the zone as a short-term ceiling. A clean close above it, especially one backed by elevated volume, alters the supply-demand balance. Short-term traders who had been fading that resistance are now underwater, and their scramble to cover could amplify any follow-through.

The move also aligned XRP with a broader wave of altcoin strength. While XRP’s 2% rise looks modest, it occurred alongside aggressive expansions in other names, as highlighted by BlockchainReporter’s weekly roundup of top gainers. That context matters. It suggests the breakout was not a token-specific catalyst but part of a wider rotation into altcoins that began picking up momentum late in the week.

Volume and the support question The breakout’s credibility rests almost entirely on how volume behaves in the coming sessions. A single spike does not confirm absorption. The market has seen false dawns before: surges that reversed within a day because there was no sustained buying behind the move. The critical test is whether $1.10 can transition from resistance to support. If buyers defend that level on a pullback, the breakout gains structural weight.

Liquidity patterns on major exchanges suggest the order book above $1.10 is thinning. That means any real demand could propel price toward the next congestion zone near $1.18 without much friction. But it also means that a failure to hold $1.10 would expose the market to a rapid slide back into the prior range, potentially triggering a cascade of long liquidations. Traders remember May’s failed breakout, which snapped back after a single strong hourly candle. That memory will keep some participants on edge.

What’s next for XRP No clear fundamental news drove the move, which makes it a purely technical event. That is both a strength and a vulnerability. A technically driven breakout attracts momentum traders and algorithmic flows, but without a narrative hook—something institutional or regulatory—it can struggle to attract the persistent capital needed for a trend. The lack of a headline means the move’s lifespan depends entirely on price action itself.

The next few Asia and Europe sessions will be important. If XRP can hold above $1.10 through low-liquidity hours, it would give the breakout a chance to settle into a higher range. A fast retracement, by contrast, would signal that late-session buyers were simply hunting stops rather than building a position. For now, the market is in a wait-and-see posture, watching for confirmation that the bid is real.

AUTHOR

Max delves deep into the cryptocurrency realm, with a passion for altcoins and NFTs. Convinced of crypto's transformative potential, he envisions a decentralized financial future. Max's background in the financial sector grants him unique insights into global monetary systems. In his leisure, Max embraces the thrill of adventures and is an avid sports enthusiast, finding balance and rejuvenation away from work.

Italy’s largest bank disclosed an $18 million XRP position, and the interesting part is not the size but the plumbing: the exposure runs through Grayscale’s trust, not through wallets, keys, or even the shiny new ETFs. Bank crypto exposure has more than doubled in two quarters, and the wrappers banks choose reveal exactly how far the regulated world has actually come. This is the anatomy of how a bank buys a token.

Summary

Italy’s largest bank disclosed an $18 million XRP position through Grayscale’s trust, highlighting how regulated banks continue to prefer traditional securities over direct crypto holdings. European banks’ disclosed crypto exposure has more than doubled to $235 million, although most positions remain small, wrapped and focused on strategic exposure rather than treasury investments. The structure banks choose to hold crypto reflects regulatory, capital and custody constraints, offering a clearer signal of institutional adoption than the size of individual investments. The most institutionally significant XRP purchase of the year fits in a footnote. Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest banking group with over a trillion dollars in assets, disclosed a roughly $18 million position in XRP, acquired not on any crypto exchange, not through self-custody, not even through the spot exchange-traded funds that launched to such fanfare, but through shares of Grayscale’s XRP trust, a wrapper most retail traders stopped thinking about years ago.

Intesa bought an approximately $18 million position in the Grayscale XRP Trust

— Degi (@bryLFC88) July 9, 2026 Eighteen million dollars is a rounding error for Intesa, less than 0.002% of its balance sheet, and dismissing the disclosure on size would miss what it actually documents. Bank crypto exposure in aggregate has more than doubled across two quarters, from roughly $100 million to $235 million among disclosing European institutions, and each disclosure is a specimen of the same understudied question: when a regulated deposit-taking institution decides to hold a volatile digital asset, what does it actually buy, through what legal object, on whose books, and why that one? The answers are duller than the headlines and far more informative, because the wrapper a bank selects encodes everything, its regulators’ current mood, its capital treatment, its custody constraints, and its honest time horizon.

This piece uses the Intesa position as a dissection subject. It covers the menu of structures through which a bank can hold crypto and what each one costs in capital, operations, and optics; why a trust, of all things, beat both the ETFs and direct custody for this purchase; what the doubling of bank exposure does and does not signal about the institutional wave every forecast depends on; the XRP-specific reading, since the asset choice is itself information; and the checkable signals that would show bank demand becoming the structural bid the market has priced in advance so many times.

The menu: five ways a bank can own a coin A bank deciding to hold crypto chooses among five structures, and the choice is never about preference; it is about what its regulator, risk committee, and accounting framework will tolerate this quarter.

The first is direct ownership with self-custody: coins on the balance sheet, keys in the bank’s control. It is the purest exposure and the rarest, because it triggers everything at once, the harshest prudential capital treatment, under Basel-derived rules a risk weight so punitive that unhedged direct holdings can require capital near the position’s full value, plus operational custody risk the institution must build or buy, plus accounting volatility straight through earnings. A handful of pioneers run small direct books as strategic learning exercises; as a portfolio structure it barely exists.

The second is direct ownership with third-party custody: the bank owns coins held by a qualified custodian. It softens the operational problem and none of the capital problem, and it is the structure banks build for clients, custody as a fee business, far more often than for themselves; Intesa itself has run a proprietary desk and custody buildout along exactly these lines, which makes its choice of a different wrapper for this position all the more instructive.

The third is the exchange-traded fund: regulated, liquid, redeemable, tracking tightly through the creation-and-redemption machinery that keeps share and coin prices glued. For most institutions the ETF is the modern default, which is precisely why a bank bypassing it deserves attention.

The fourth is the trust or closed-end structure, the Grayscale lineage: a fund holding coins, whose shares trade as securities, historically without the redemption loop that disciplines ETF pricing, meaning shares can and famously did trade at large premiums and discounts to the underlying. The fifth is synthetic exposure, futures, notes, certificates, total-return swaps, owning the price without the asset, the structure of choice where regulators permit derivatives more readily than holdings.

JUST IN: Grayscale has categorized $XRP under the
"Global Payments" investment narrative, highlighting its role in cross-border payments and digital financial infrastructure. As institutional interest in blockchain continues to grow, #XRPArmy pic.twitter.com/g4NEi1p86Y

— Michelle Kirby X (@michelekirby623) July 10, 2026 Read as a ladder, the five structures run from maximum conviction and maximum friction at the top to minimum commitment at the bottom, and where an institution steps on reveals its constraints more honestly than its press releases. A bank in a jurisdiction with settled ETF access, clean capital rules, and a supportive supervisor buys the ETF. A bank that buys a trust is telling you something specific.

Why the trust: the unglamorous logic Intesa’s route through Grayscale’s XRP trust looks, at first glance, like choosing a flip phone, and the logic assembles quickly once the constraints are listed.

The first constraint is geography and availability. The US spot XRP ETFs are new, their European availability to a regulated Italian bank’s balance sheet runs through legal and distribution questions that a US-listed trust security, tradeable as an ordinary share, sidesteps; European institutions have bought American trust shares for years precisely because they slot into existing securities plumbing, custody, settlement, and reporting included, with no crypto-specific operational buildout at all. For a first position, or a small strategic one, the wrapper that requires zero new infrastructure wins on cost alone.

The second is the capital and accounting angle. A trust share is a security, held and risk-weighted as one under frameworks the bank already runs, while direct coin holdings drag the punitive crypto-specific capital treatment; the wrapper does not eliminate the exposure’s volatility, and it can materially simplify its regulatory life. The third is discretion and reversibility: an $18 million security position is entered, marked, and exited like any other line in a trading book, with no wallets to explain, no custodian onboarding, no board-level operational review, an experiment sized and structured to be abandonable, which is exactly how serious institutions run first experiments.

In diesem Video geht es um Goldman Sachs, Intesa Sanpaolo, sinkende XRP Bestände auf Börsen und die Frage, warum der Kurs trotz positiver Onchain Daten noch nicht wirklich reagiert.

Außerdem ordnen wir ein, ob die fehlende Krypto Liquidität wirklich verschwunden ist, oder nur… https://t.co/GcYvrwSBk7 pic.twitter.com/ttVelYqLEj

— CryptoTuts (@CryptoTuts) July 9, 2026 The fourth is the trust’s historical quirk turned feature: with spot ETFs now existing as conversion or competition targets, the old discount problem that made trusts hazardous has largely resolved, while the structure retains its accessibility. The instrument that spent years as the cautionary tale about wrappers, its discounts the very evidence that forced the ETF era into being, now serves as the quiet on-ramp for institutions whose plumbing has not caught up to the products the caution produced. Finance rarely wastes an old vehicle; it reassigns it.

The capital rules: the constraint underneath everything The single largest force shaping how banks hold crypto never appears in the headlines, so it earns its own section: prudential capital treatment, the rules deciding how much of a bank’s own equity must stand behind each asset it holds. The international framework finalized by the Basel Committee sorts crypto exposures into groups, with tokenized traditional assets and qualifying stablecoins receiving conventional treatment, and unbacked cryptoassets, the Bitcoin-and-XRP category, consigned to the punitive tier: a risk weight of 1,250%, the framework’s maximum, which in practice requires capital roughly equal to the exposure itself, plus an aggregate cap holding such exposures to a sliver of a bank’s Tier 1 capital. The design intent was explicit, to make direct crypto holdings nearly uneconomic for banks, and it succeeded: no meaningful direct bank crypto book exists anywhere under full Basel-aligned rules.

The wrapper economy documented in this piece is, in large part, the industry’s negotiated response to that number. A trust share or ETF position may, depending on jurisdiction and interpretation, route through securities and funds treatments instead of the maximum weight; synthetic exposures route through derivatives and market-risk frameworks; and client-custody businesses, where the bank never owns the coins at all, sit outside the exposure caps entirely, which is why custody is where bank crypto revenue actually lives. None of this is evasion, every structure is disclosed and supervised, and all of it is arbitrage in the honest sense: institutions selecting, among permitted forms, the one whose capital cost matches their conviction. The forward-looking point follows directly: the capital rules are under active review in multiple jurisdictions, industry bodies have pressed for recalibration as the classification legislation matures, and any softening of the 1,250% regime would do more for bank demand than a decade of conferences, because it changes the only number bank treasurers actually optimize. Watch the consultations, not the keynotes.

The specimen in context: who else, and how Intesa’s disclosure lands within a recognizable cohort, and the cohort’s composition sharpens the reading. European institutions dominate the disclosed-exposure aggregate for a structural reason: MiCA’s arrival gave the continent’s banks a supervisory framework to point to, and supervised clarity, even strict clarity, unlocks more institutional behavior than permissive ambiguity ever has. The cohort’s positions share the Intesa profile almost uniformly, small against the balance sheet, wrapped rather than direct, concentrated in the majors plus, notably, XRP, and framed internally as strategic learning. Around the disclosed positions sits the larger undisclosed economy: bank-run custody for funds and corporates, structured notes and certificates giving private-bank clients crypto exposure, and trading desks making markets in ETPs, all of which generate crypto revenue without crypto balance-sheet exposure and all of which grew straight through the drawdown. The honest map of bank adoption, in other words, is a pyramid: a vast base of client-service activity, a thin middle of wrapped proprietary positions like Intesa’s, and an apex of direct holdings that remains, by regulatory design, nearly empty. Adoption forecasts that conflate the layers, and most do, mistake the pyramid’s base for its apex and misprice both.

What $100M to $235M actually signals The aggregate number behind the Intesa specimen, disclosed bank crypto exposure more than doubling to $235 million in two quarters, invites two opposite readings, and the honest analysis requires holding both.

The deflationary reading starts with scale: $235 million across the European banking system is not institutional adoption; it is institutional curiosity, a few basis points of trading-book capacity spread across a handful of names, an order of magnitude below what single corporate treasuries deployed in the last cycle and three orders below the ETF complex. Banks hold these positions the way they hold any exotic, small, hedged or hedgeable, and structured for exit, and extrapolating a wave from a doubling of a tiny base is the oldest error in institutional-adoption forecasting. The doubling also coincides with the drawdown, which cuts both ways: it is conviction buying weakness, or it is desks accumulating inventory for client products rather than expressing any house view at all, and disclosures rarely distinguish the two.

The inflationary reading counts differently: it counts precedents. Every structure a bank uses for a small position is a structure approved, documented, and reusable for a large one; the expensive part of institutional adoption was never the buying but the permissioning, the risk-committee papers, the regulator conversations, the accounting memos, and each disclosed position is proof that some institution’s permissioning is complete. On this reading, $235 million is not the wave, it is the wave’s paperwork, and the doubling measures how fast the paperwork is clearing. The reading gains force from who is moving: Intesa is not a crypto-adjacent challenger but a systemically important incumbent whose choices get studied by every peer risk committee in Europe, and incumbent behavior is the single best-documented contagion vector in institutional finance.

Both readings share one implication worth stating plainly: the structural bank bid, the one in the conditional price forecasts, remains almost entirely in front of, not behind, the current market, which is precisely why the classification legislation gates so much of every forecast. Banks buy at the pace their constraints dissolve, and the constraints are dissolving on legislative and supervisory calendars, not market ones.

A note on the disclosure mechanics themselves rounds out the specimen. Bank positions of this kind surface through securities filings, fund shareholder registers, and periodic risk disclosures, each with its own lag and granularity, and the analysts who compiled the $235 million aggregate are stitching exactly these sources. The number is therefore a floor, not a census: positions below reporting thresholds, exposures inside synthetic structures, and holdings at institutions with lighter disclosure regimes all escape it, which means the true wrapped-proprietary layer is somewhat larger and its growth rate somewhat smoother than the headline doubling suggests. It also means the series improves mechanically as the asset class formalizes, more filings, finer categories, shorter lags, so part of every future increase will be measurement catching up with reality, a caveat worth carrying into each new headline about bank exposure records.

What a bank position is not Two category errors follow every bank-crypto disclosure, and clearing them sharpens what remains. The first is reading a trading-book position as a treasury strategy. Corporate treasury adopters hold coins as a reserve-asset thesis, financed by their capital structure and marked as conviction; a bank’s wrapped $18 million sits in a book built for exposures that come and go, sized inside limits designed to make its total loss immaterial, and often paired with hedges or client flows invisible from outside. The position’s information value is procedural, not directional: it proves the pipe exists, not that the water is committed. The second error is reading disclosure timing as buying timing. Positions surface through reporting cycles months after their construction, get built across many sessions to avoid moving thin markets, and can be inventory against structured products the bank has sold, not a view at all. The market’s habit of backdating conviction onto the disclosure date has embarrassed every analyst who indulged it, and the professional reading discipline is the same one every filing teaches: the fact is the exposure and its structure; the story is unrecoverable from public data and should be priced accordingly.

There is also the question of what would make a bank sell, which no adoption narrative ever models. Wrapped positions of this size exit for reasons that have nothing to do with crypto, quarter-end optics, risk-limit reshuffles, a supervisor’s raised eyebrow, a desk head’s rotation, and their departure would generate exactly the headlines their arrival did, inverted and equally overread. The institutional bid, when it truly forms, will be identifiable not by any single entry but by its behavior through stress: positions that persist across drawdowns, disclosures that grow through bad quarters, and wrapper migrations toward more committed structures while prices fall. By that standard, the current cohort is untested, the drawdown positions are its first examination, and the next two reporting cycles are worth more than the last ten announcements.

The XRP of it: why this asset, from this buyer The asset selection is its own signal, and it reads differently from a bank than it would from a fund. XRP is, among major assets, the one whose institutional story runs through exactly the world Intesa inhabits: cross-border payments, correspondent banking, and a corporate sponsor that has spent a decade selling to institutions like Intesa, an empire whose honest token accounting this publication has mapped. A European bank taking its crypto first step in XRP rather than only Bitcoin is choosing the asset whose bull case is denominated in its own industry’s plumbing, which makes the position readable as strategic reconnaissance as much as investment: a small, live stake in the asset one’s own payments division will inevitably be asked about.

The timing adds the contrarian layer: the position surfaces with XRP down roughly 70% from its peak, the tradable float at seven-year lows, and sentiment at cycle extremes, which is either exactly when patient institutional money historically steps in, or exactly the environment in which a small position is cheap enough to serve as an option on the payments thesis resolving. Eighteen million dollars does not move the asset. Eighteen million dollars of precedent, from this buyer, in this structure, at this point in the cycle, is the kind of data point the next dozen risk committees cite, and the market’s institutional wave, if it ever arrives, will be assembled out of citations exactly like it.

The historical rhyme deserves a paragraph, because banks have run this exact sequence before. Gold ETFs in the early 2000s, emerging-market debt in the 1990s, and high-yield credit before that each entered bank balance sheets the same way: first as client-service revenue, then as small wrapped proprietary positions justified as market-making inventory, then, after capital treatments matured and a cycle survived, as ordinary allocations nobody announced. The sequence’s clock is measured in years per stage, its motor is regulatory calibration, not price, and its tell, in every prior asset class, was the moment risk committees stopped writing special memos for the exposure, the bureaucratic non-event that never makes news and always precedes size. Crypto’s bank adoption is visibly mid-sequence: the client-service layer is thriving, the wrapped-position layer is doubling off a tiny base, and the special memos are still being written. The Intesa disclosure is one such memo made public, and the forecast it supports is not a price target but a schedule: the asset class is roughly one capital-rule revision and one uneventful cycle away from the stage where positions like this stop being articles.

One more actor deserves mention because it shadows every European bank’s calculus: the ECB and the digital-euro project, whose relationship with private crypto assets ranges from indifference to rivalry depending on the week. A eurozone bank’s crypto position lives under a supervisor whose own institution is building a competing settlement future, and the diplomacy of that position, small enough to be unobjectionable, wrapped enough to be conventional, useful enough to inform the bank’s own digital-asset strategy, explains the specimen’s every parameter as well as any market view does. Banks do not merely hold assets; they hold positions within relationships, and the wrapper is part of the diplomacy.

The signals that would show the wave forming The Intesa specimen suggests its own dashboard, and each line is public. Watch the disclosure aggregate, the $235 million line, for its next doubling and its composition, trusts versus ETFs versus direct, because wrapper migration toward more committed structures is the maturation signal. Watch European ETF and ETP access for banks, the plumbing whose arrival collapses the trust workaround. Watch the supervisory texture, capital-treatment consultations and national supervisor guidance, the constraint whose relaxation moves faster than any narrative. Watch whether custody businesses and proprietary positions converge, banks that custody for clients acquiring house exposure and vice versa, the pattern that preceded every prior asset class’s institutional normalization. And watch the legislation, always, because the classification question sets the risk weights and the risk weights set the size.

The conclusion the dissection supports is deliberately modest and, for that reason, durable. Intesa’s $18 million documents neither a wave nor a fad; it documents a procedure, the specific, replicable, now-approved path by which a trillion-dollar European bank holds a crypto asset without touching a key, and procedures, once they exist, get reused at whatever size conditions permit. The market has spent years pricing the day banks arrive. The disclosure’s quiet news is that the arrival, when it comes, will look exactly like this: no announcement, no wallet, a securities ticket in an old wrapper, and a footnote that compounds.

The dissection closes where it began, with proportion. Eighteen million dollars, one wrapper, one bank: as a market event it is nothing, and the piece has argued it is the most informative kind of nothing, a procedure caught on camera. Institutional adoption was never going to arrive as an announcement, because institutions do not announce; they file, and the filing cadence, the wrapper choices, and the capital consultations are the wave in its only observable form. Readers who want to track it need three bookmarks, the disclosure aggregates, the Basel-review docket, and the European ETP-access rulings, and one habit: when the next bank position surfaces, ask not how much but through what, because in this corner of the market, the plumbing is the story, and it has been telling it, quietly and in public, one footnote at a time.

And one sentence for the traders who read this far looking for the signal: there is none on the tape today, and there is a precise one coming, because bank flows, unlike whale flows, pre-announce themselves through rulemaking, and the rulemaking calendar is public. The edge in this corner of the market is not speed. It is literacy, and the literacy is teachable, which is what this dissection was for.

The specimen will be superseded, probably within a quarter, by a larger name or a bigger number, and the framework will not: five wrappers, one capital regime, a pyramid of adoption layers, and a disclosure lag between them all. Keep the framework, discard the headline, and the next footnote reads itself.

A closing housekeeping note: the exposure figures cited here reflect analyst compilations of public disclosures at this writing, the wrapper landscape is being actively reshaped by ETF access rulings and capital consultations, and readers applying this framework to future disclosures should expect the menu’s relative costs, though not its structure, to have shifted. The structure is the durable part; it always is.

The banks, unlike the traders, are in no hurry, and the wrappers, unlike the narratives, keep perfect records; between those two facts sits everything this piece has argued.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile, and you can lose your entire investment. Figures are current as of July 9, 2026, and may change. Always do your own research.

XRP is at risk of a downside move, as falling open interest and a possible bear flag pattern point to $1.04 as the next key support level.

XRP continues to show signs of weakening momentum, with both on-chain data and technical indicators pointing to intense selling pressure.

A CryptoQuant analysis reveals declining participation in the derivatives market. At the same time, chart analysis suggests a bearish continuation pattern could send the token toward lower support levels.

XRP Open Interest Drops Lower CryptoQuant verified author PelinayPA highlighted that XRP’s open interest on Binance has fallen to $350.6 million, one of its lowest readings in recent months. The decline suggests traders are increasingly closing leveraged positions and preferring to stay on the sidelines as interest in derivative exposure to the asset drops.

The open interest across all exchanges has also followed a similar trajectory. At the time of writing, the metric stood at $776 million, reaching lows last seen in February.

Meanwhile, the Network Value to Transactions (NVT) ratio remains elevated at 162.86. High NVT readings generally indicate that network activity has not recovered enough to impact XRP’s valuation. This suggests that activities on the XRP Ledger remain minimal and continue to affect the asset’s recovery negatively.

XRP OI and NVT/CryptoQuant Taken together, the analyst noted that these indicators reflect a market where risk appetite has cooled considerably, leaving sellers with the upper hand. Unless the current condition changes, the XRP price remains vulnerable and could drop further.

Bear Flag Pattern Puts $1.04 in Focus Meanwhile, a 1-hour chart analysis from Ali Martinez adds to the cautious outlook. In a parallel analysis, he identified a bearish formation that could potentially push XRP lower.

An accompanying chart shows that after a sharp decline, XRP has been consolidating inside what appears to be a bear flag. Its price is compressing between the structure’s upper resistance and the ascending support trendline below.

XRP Bear Flag/Ali Martinez Notably, this type of pattern often represents a pause after an extended downtrend rather than the beginning of a sustained recovery. Prices make higher lows but are unable to break above a horizontal resistance level. Eventually, a breakdown occurs, starting the next leg down.

Martinez suggested that if this is a flag pattern, then XRP is at risk of further downsides. The flag breaking down could start a measured move toward $1.04, a 5% drop from the current market price of $1.10.

DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.

Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP, and Dogecoin (DOGE) have recovered as technical talks between the US and Iran continue, according to a US official.

This comes as Middle East tensions rise following two days of strikes that threatened to collapse an already fragile ceasefire, with President Trump saying the ceasefire is “over.”

Technical Talks with Iran Will Proceed, Says US Official A US official confirmed that the US remains committed to a resolution and that technical talks with Iran will proceed, Bloomberg reported. These focus on issues including nuclear matters, the performance-based MOU, sanctions, and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

As a result, Oil prices slipped lower, the US 10-year Treasury note eased to around 4.54%, and the US dollar index (DXY) fell toward 100.5 on Friday. This helped trigger a significant jump in Asian stock markets and crypto prices of Bitcoin, XRP, and DOGE.

Meanwhile, Israel tells the US it has new intelligence implying Iran is planning a new assassination attempt against President Trump. At Khamenei’s funeral last week, Iranian mourners displayed a banner reading “We Will Kill Trump.”

Tensions in the Middle East are rising as reports claim Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain carried out coordinated strikes targeting Iran, with U.S. intelligence support. This comes after Iranian attacks on Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and Qatar, including targeting U.S. military infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Mark Warner slammed Trump for failing to secure a ceasefire and dragged America back into a “dangerous and illegal war” with Iran.

Having failed to secure a lasting peace or achieve his stated objectives, President Trump has once again dragged America back into a dangerous and illegal war with Iran.

By ignoring the vote of the Congress to stop this war, the President has doubled down on endangering American…

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 9, 2026

Investors Push Bitcoin, XRP and DOGE Prices Higher Bitcoin and the broader crypto market saw a notable upside momentum over the past few hours. BTC price climbed above $64,000 after a more than 1% jump in just an hour. In the last 24 hours, BTC has climbed nearly 4% over the past 2 days.

The derivatives market showed buying in the last few hours, as per CoinGlass data. The total Bitcoin futures open interest climbed 2.70% to above $47 billion in the last 4 hours. Massive buying was recorded across CME, Binance, OKX, Bybit and other crypto exchanges.

Total Bitcoin Futures Open Interest Climbs. Source: Coinglass XRP also bounced higher, holding near $1.11 amid positive developments, including US-Iran talks on a potential ceasefire and nuclear deal. The intraday low and high were $1.09 and $1.11, respectively.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has announced task forces, led by industry insiders such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and XBOX CEO Asha Sharma, to overhaul central bank strategies, with a focus on AI, data, and inflation.

Whereas Dogecoin (DOGE) pumped more than 2% in the last 4 hours, with the price currently trading at $0.074. XRP and DOGE futures open interests also jumped 1% in 4 hours, signaling positive sentiment for further upside.

To capture these swift market movements, active traders can compare the leading platforms by exploring our guide to the best crypto apps for mobile trading.

Crypto market traders are bracing for Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), XRP, and Solana (SOL) options expiry today. Traders anticipate short-term volatility in the broader crypto market ahead of next week’s US CPI and PPI inflation data releases. Seasonality, cooling jobless claims, and US-Iran technical talks have sparked a recovery in crypto prices.

Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL jumped amid a fall in oil prices, US Treasury yields, and the US dollar index. Crypto market sets eyes on max pain amid potential recovery further.

Crypto Market Braces for $1.5 Billion Bitcoin Options Expiry According to Deribit data, more than 23K BTC options with a notional value of almost $1.5 billion expire on July 10, with a put-call ratio of 1. In the last 24 hours, call volume remains higher than put volume with a put-call ratio of 0.75, indicating a neutral stance among traders.

Moreover, max pain price is at $62,000, lower than the current Bitcoin price of $64,100. This shows a high odds of a pullback, but implied volatility and 25-delta skew signaled traders expect crypto market to remain flat.

Options traders are selling out-of-the-money calls, which indicates that institutions generally agree the market lacks upward momentum. This could keep Bitcoin price below $65K resistance level.

Bitcoin Options Open Interest. Source: Deribit Ethereum Options with $250 Million in Notional Value to Expire Over 140K ETH options with a notional value of $248 million are set to expire. The put-call ratio is 1.27. However, call volume has exceeded put volumes over the last 24 hours, with a bullish put-call ratio of 0.81.

Also, the max pain point is at $1,700, below the current market price. Notably, the call bets are higher at the strike price, indicating lower chances of massive selling pressure. Traders expect ETH price to move towards $1,800 after this week’s options expiry.

Ethereum Options Open Interest. Source: Deribit Ethereum price jumped almost 2% over the past 24 hours amid hopes of US-Iran talks to continue and broader crypto market recovery. The 24-hour low and high are $1,730 and $1,786, respectively. However, trading volume has dropped by 13%.

XRP and Solana (SOL) Max Pain Price XRP options of notional value $2.47 million to expire, with a put-call ratio of 0.76. The max pain price is at $1.06, indicating the key level to watch as the crypto asset shows higher volatility amid whale moves.

XRP price climbed 1.50% to $1.11, rising above the max pain price despite massive net outflows of $7.29 million from Bitwise XRP ETF. It saw a massive drop in trading volume over the past 24 hours.

XRP Max Pain Price. Source: Deribit Meanwhile, $17 million in Solana options will expire today, with a put-call ratio of 0.40. The max pain price is $75, lower than the current market price. However, traders eye upside momentum towards $80 strike price.

Crypto market traders await US CPI inflation data for cues before making further trades. Core inflation is projected to come in at 0.3% against 0.2% US CPI inflation print last month, keeping Core CPI YoY stable at 2.9%.

Cleveland Fed data showed the annual CPI inflation rate cooled from 4.2% in May to 3.9% in June. However, Goldman Sachs claims the combined effects of AI-induced increases in memory, software, and electricity prices are boosting inflation in the US.

AI Driven Memory Chips Costs Boosts Inflation. Source: Goldman Sachs Aside from adjusting their options positions, many macro-focused traders are actively placing wagers on the best crypto prediction markets to speculate directly on whether the core CPI will meet expectations.