A Bitcoin short squeeze carried XRP to $1.29 while its funds sat out

XRP surged around 30% last week to trade at about $1.29, its best run in months.

The token jumped as the exchange-traded fund inflows that had supported earlier gains dried up.

Wednesday did the heavy lifting

XRP surged 10.40% on Wednesday, its biggest one-day gain since February 6, before adding a second leg Thursday that pushed the weekly candle toward $1.32.

The level is just under the token’s 200-day average price, the closest XRP has traded to that line since the beginning of the year.

The rally lifted XRP off a floor of $0.9862, which it touched the week before. This is the same zone the token hovered in just before its post-election surge in November 2024, which took it to an all-time high close to $3.65.

The Relative Strength Index on the daily chart hit 79.2. The RSI has a scale of 0 to 100, with readings near 80 indicating an asset is heavily overbought.

Bitcoin, which surged above $72,000 on Thursday, its highest level since May, was the catalyst.

On Wednesday, shorts on Bitcoin were liquidated for $2.75 billion in crypto’s biggest-ever short-liquidation event, CoinGlass data shows. The 24-hour figure ran to $3 billion across the market.

The U.S. Treasury said it would raise the size of its long-end buybacks to at least $4 billion per operation starting September 9.

Traders interpreted the plan as a sign of looser financial conditions, and the move came hours before President Donald Trump met with crypto executives from Coinbase, Ripple, and Robinhood at the White House.

ETF demand cooled while the price ran

XRP beat its usual correlation with Bitcoin, but its ETF inflows dipped off in the surge.

The United States spot XRP ETFs saw 30 straight days of net inflows after the launch of Canary Capital’s XRPC on November 13, amassing $1.18 billion in combined assets by mid-December, according to a report from Cryptopolitan at the time.

That steady flow became one of the reasons for the token’s bullish case. CNBC correspondent MacKenzie Sigalos called XRP the standout crypto trade of 2026 in a January segment, pointing to inflows that held up during a fourth-quarter dip even as Bitcoin ETF flows fell, as Cryptopolitan reported.

This week was a reversal for XRP. The price jumped, and the fund demand that had pushed XRP higher before took a breather.

XRP open interest is already down over 11% from its rally-day high, suggesting some of the leverage behind the rally is unwinding.

According to CoinGecko, XRP is currently trading at $1.26, up 11.3% on the day and 23.1% over the week.

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