XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) holders spent years waiting for the SEC case to end, for XRP ETFs to get approved and launch, and for Ripple to land partnerships that would prove XRP belonged in institutional portfolios. All of that has happened in the last twelve months, but somehow, the XRP price is lower now than it was before any of it started.
Ripple is having its best year ever as a company, but the XRP price is down by 43% year-to-date and 60% from its $3.65 high. The question everyone is asking is why XRP isn’t going up despite its solid fundamentals. There are three specific things holding XRP back, and they explain why the XRP price is stagnant at $1.35-$1.40 while Ripple keeps stacking wins.
Factor 1: XRP Doesn’t Move Without Bitcoin
XRP tracks Bitcoin roughly 80% of the time, and when it moves, it swings about 1.8 times more in either direction. When Bitcoin dropped from $74,000 to $70,000 after the Fed’s March 18 decision, XRP fell 10% in the same window while BTC gave up about 5%. It doesn’t matter how many wins Ripple stacks up—if Bitcoin is falling, XRP falls just as much or even more.
Bitcoin has been stuck between $65,000 and $75,000 since the February crash. The Iran conflict pushed oil above $93 per barrel, the Fed held rates at 3.5–3.75% and raised its 2026 inflation forecast to 2.7%, and futures markets aren’t pricing in a rate cut before December at the earliest. BTC briefly touched $60,000 in February, and has been grinding sideways ever since. Bitcoin ETFs have also bled over $3.8 billion in outflows since January, meaning institutional money is not rotating between assets, but leaving crypto entirely.
Bitcoin dominance sits at 58.6% and has stayed above 58% for most of 2026. Altcoin seasons typically start when dominance drops below 50% and capital begins flowing out of Bitcoin into smaller assets, but that rotation hasn’t started. Institutions aren’t moving into altcoins but rather pulling out of crypto or parking what’s left in Bitcoin as the safer bet. Until Bitcoin breaks above $75,000 and holds it, XRP could have the best fundamentals in crypto and it wouldn’t move the price up one bit.
Factor 2: Underwater XRP Holders Sell Into Every Rally
Whales have been cashing out steadily since XRP hit $3.65 in July 2025. An estimated $6 billion in XRP has been sold by large holders since that peak, and roughly 3.8 billion tokens have flowed onto Binance since January 2026 alone. In late February, $652 million worth of XRP moved onto the exchange in a single week, which marked the largest weekly inflow of the year. Most of these whales bought below $0.65, so they’re taking profit whenever XRP starts rallying.
| Resistance Level | XRP Accumulated | What Happens |
| $1.44–$1.45 | 36.8B XRP at average cost | Breakeven selling from majority of holders |
| $1.58–$1.60 | 2B XRP | First major wall (months of underwater holders exit) |
| $1.76–$1.80 | 1.85B XRP | Second wall (January rally buyers sell at breakeven) |
About 60% of XRP’s circulating supply—roughly 36.8 billion tokens—is held at a cost basis above the current price, according to Glassnode data from early March. The average cost basis across all holders sits around $1.44, which is almost exactly where XRP has mostly been trading. Every time the XRP price pushes toward that level, holders who’ve been sitting on losses for weeks or months sell to break even and get out. And that’s why $1.45 has acted as a ceiling through most of March.
Even if XRP clears $1.45, there’s more selling pressure stacked above it. Every price level between $1.40 and $3.65 has a cluster of holders waiting to get back to breakeven or profit.
Factor 3: XRP ETF Flows Aren’t Helping the Price
XRP ETFs launched in November 2025 and recorded 43 consecutive days of positive inflows. The products hit $483 million in December alone, and $1.44 billion in cumulative inflows as of mid March.
However, weekly inflows have since collapsed from over $200 million at launch to under $2 million in March. The funds posted $28 million in net outflows the same week Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $767 million. Total assets under management dropped from a January peak of $1.65 billion to roughly $1 billion, mostly because XRP’s price kept falling.
Around 84% of the money in XRP ETFs comes from retail investors, with only 15.9% tied to institutional filers on 13F disclosures. Solana ETFs, by comparison, have 48.8% institutional participation. Goldman Sachs holds $153.8 million across four XRP ETFs—the largest single position—but Bloomberg’s James Seyffart flagged it as likely trading desk activity rather than a long-term conviction bet. This reveals that the institutional wave that the commodity status was supposed to unlock hasn’t shown up yet.
At the current pace of $1.9 million per week, XRP ETFs would add roughly $100 million by year-end. That’s nowhere near enough to create meaningful supply pressure that could move the XRP price. Standard Chartered estimated that XRP ETFs would need $20 to $40 million per week in sustained inflows to start squeezing supply. Right now, ETFs are keeping XRP from falling further, but they’re not giving it a reason to go up.
What Needs to Change for the XRP Price to Break Out?
The three factors holding XRP back right now are all feeding off each other. A rally that stems from one of the factors working out but not the others just gets sold into, which is exactly what’s happened every time XRP has pushed toward $1.50 this year. For the XRP price to break out of the $1.30 to $1.50 range, all the three things holding XRP back need to work out at the same time.
The one catalyst that could trigger that is the Clarity Act. The Senate Banking Committee is targeting a markup in the second half of April, and Polymarket puts passage odds around 72%. If it passes, XRP’s commodity status becomes permanent federal law, and such clarity would unlock more institutional adoption. It would also give banks a reason to settle in XRP rather than defaulting to RLUSD—and that’s when the XRP price would start moving up again.
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