Market context
XRP traded below $1 on Tuesday for the first time since early 2025, per U.Today, breaking a support band that had absorbed every macro shock of the past 18 months. The move landed inside a broader risk-off session. Bitcoin stuck below $65,000 after the Strait of Hormuz relief trade unraveled and President Trump demanded 50 years of Iranian compensation, CoinDesk reported Wednesday, pushing oil back to $89 and leaving crypto and equities flat into a pivotal US CPI print.
The specific catalyst for XRP wasn't a Ripple headline. It was a combination of flow. ETF inflows into US-listed XRP products plunged 93% week-over-week, per Crypto.News, gutting the marginal spot bid that had cushioned prior selloffs. Volume followed. Open interest then jumped $171 million in a single hour Tuesday afternoon, U.Today reported, splitting the tape into a coiled positioning setup ahead of Wednesday's inflation data.
And the tape has memory. XRP spent Q1 grinding above $1.20 on Ripple's institutional narrative: the Treasury platform pitch, XRPL real-world asset growth, a rumored spot XRP ETF push. Each of those threads is intact. What broke Tuesday was patience. Traders long from the $1.20 to $1.41 range, waiting on a Wave 3 breakout that Standard Chartered had marketed toward $8 by 2026, found themselves underwater with no CPI-day cover. Stops cascaded. And a bridge exploit gave the bears a headline to pin the wick on.
Technical setup
$1 is not an arbitrary line. It's the 18-month floor, the level XRP defended through the March 2025 banking scare, the summer growth panic, and the October rate-hold repricing. CryptoNews's technical desk mapped a Wave 3 path to $3 from this same base earlier Tuesday, framing the $1 test as either the launch pad or the invalidation. There's no third read.