Market context
July 13, 2023 was the day XRP stopped being an SEC target and started becoming an institutional asset. Three years later, Ripple has 13,000 bank connections routed through its Treasury platform and claims $12.5 trillion in annualized payment visibility, per Brad Garlinghouse's remarks around the anniversary. The company also spent roughly $150 million defending the case, a figure Garlinghouse disclosed to 99Bitcoins this week, and he acknowledged that shutting Ripple down and distributing XRP directly to shareholders was on the table before the Torres ruling landed.
Price hasn't followed the narrative in a straight line. XRP sits at $1.39 into the anniversary session, up on the week but still capped below $1.41, the level bulls have failed to reclaim for over a month. Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick has kept his $8 target for end-2026 on the record, contingent on a US spot XRP ETF clearing and Ripple Treasury adoption scaling from pilots to production. That is a roughly 475% move from spot. It requires the resistance overhead to break first.
SBI Holdings submitted a letter of intent to acquire Bitbank this week, a deal that if closed would deepen XRP's Japanese liquidity base and give Ripple a controlled distribution partner in Asia. Separately, XRPL activity is up roughly 300% on unclear catalysts, and tokenized real-world assets on the ledger have crossed $3.6 billion excluding stablecoins, with a growing slice in tokenized energy commodities.
Technical setup
The chart is coiled. XRP has spent the last four weeks between $1.20 and $1.41, a band tight enough to squeeze funding and thin enough that any decisive move burns through both sides quickly. Perp funding on Binance and Bybit has flipped between slightly positive and neutral without the sustained crowded-long readings that usually precede a leverage flush. That's a change from June, when funding stayed hot into every rejection.