This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
This Week
XRP ends the week at $1.51, inside a range of 99 cents to $1.70, and it was the best performer of the major coins by a wide margin. It passed USDC into fifth place by market value along the way. Total crypto market value rose 17.4 percent to $2.62 trillion, Bitcoin dominance sat at 59.0 percent, and the Fear and Greed Index closed at 66, which reads as Greed. 7 days ago it read 34, which was Fear.
Monday’s low was the low for this cycle. On Wednesday the United States Treasury doubled the pace of its long dated bond buybacks, and on the same afternoon Trump hosted the crypto industry at the White House and told Congress to pass the CLARITY Act. XRP closed that day around 10 percent higher and did not stop until Saturday.
Underneath the price, the institutions moved. The spot funds crossed a threshold they have been approaching since November, and the largest bank in their table is back after emptying its position in the spring. Ripple’s dollar token passed a milestone of its own, in a place XRP holders may not enjoy. The vote everything hangs on is 23 days away.
The Consensus
🚀 XRP had its best week in years, with a 51 percent gain that carried it past USDC into fifth place.
🏛️ Trump told Congress to pass the CLARITY Act, with Ripple’s chief executive in the room on Wednesday.
🔒 The 7 spot funds now hold more than a billion XRP, and Goldman Sachs is the largest disclosed holder.
💵 RLUSD passed $2 billion in circulation, and most of the new supply was issued on Ethereum.
The Numbers
The Chart Watch
The Deep Trend Was the Last Target, and We Got There
So the chart is from today, and you can see it straight away. The Deep Trend is where the last target was.
We went through those targets every Sunday. $1.30, then $1.50, and then the final one sitting up around the Deep Trend at $1.72. Every single one of them hit, inside a week.
I started building my position around $1.00. That is my position and not a suggestion, and I said at the time it was because the second half of a midterm year is where this market either carves out a bottom or hands you levels worth averaging into. I am out of the leverage position now. Most of the spot is sold too, and I am still holding some.
From an issue last month:
That is the page from July, with XRP at $1.10 and the bear market trendline still unbroken. Those same 3 upside levels are written on it, with the Deep Trend near $1.90 named as the cap above them. It also says where I was adding and why. Couple weeks later the trendline broke and the market went and did it.
Where we are today. Momentum is on our side. The Trigger Alert says this upside can continue, and a short squeeze could carry it towards $2 from here.
I do not think that is a new bull market starting. My read is a lower high somewhere in the $2 range, and then a move back down to retest the lows around $1.00. That is my read and I have been wrong before.
So I am not chasing this one. I am preparing for lower levels now.
The levels:
$1.72. The Deep Trend upper band, and the last of the targets. The 50 week average sits just underneath it at $1.71.
$2.00. The next line above, and where a continued squeeze could reach. I would treat that area as a lower high.
$1.23. The Deep Trend lower band, with the 200 week average sitting on the same number.
$1.04 and $1.00. The shelf I accumulated on, and the area I expect us to come back and retest.
93 cents, 80 cents and 52 cents. The levels below that, all marked on the chart.
Remember that this market always goes higher than you think and lower than you think. Be careful with FOMO, and be just as careful about panic selling. It goes up fast and it goes down fast, which is the whole reason I keep limit orders sitting out there instead of trying to catch it live.
One last thing, because a lot of very kind messages came in this week. I do not give financial advice, and please do not thank me for your trades. I will be wrong at some point. When you press that button, you press it because you think it is the right thing to do. I am here to give you my thoughts, my analysis and my best guess from the indicators I have built.
The Ripple Effect
🚀 Monday’s Low Was 98.7 Cents. Saturday’s High Was $1.70.
Monday’s low was 98.73 cents. Saturday’s high was $1.70. Five sessions separated them. XRP finished the week around $1.51, up roughly 51 percent over 7 days, which made it the strongest of the majors. Bitcoin managed 22 percent over the same stretch and ether 30 percent.
The trigger came out of the bond market. On Wednesday 19 August the United States Treasury doubled the pace of its long dated buybacks. The size went from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, and it takes effect on 9 September. Long yields fell and the dollar softened. Everything priced off them moved. XRP opened that Wednesday at $1.0013 and closed at $1.1054 (CoinDesk).
Leverage did the rest. Roughly $2.7 billion of short positions were closed out across crypto inside 72 hours. Closing a short means buying the asset back, so a wave of forced buying arrives in a market that was not expecting it. On Friday, short liquidations were 57.6 percent of all liquidations. Open interest in XRP futures rose about 21 percent to around $3.5 billion. Thursday’s volume was $10.2 billion, up 117 percent in a day (The Block, CryptoSlate).
Forced buying and fresh demand look identical on a chart. They behave differently afterwards. The funding rate is one way to tell them apart, and it stayed at 0.0100 percent per eight hours all week, which is close to flat. Traders paying almost nothing to stay long is a different picture from traders paying up to chase.
The levels were on the record first. On 16 August this newsletter put the trigger at $1.04, the price that would break the downward trendline. The 12 July Week Ahead had already set the upside on a clean break at $1.30, then $1.50, then just under $1.80. XRP cleared $1.04 on Wednesday. It ran through all three inside four days.
🏛️ “A Fair Version of the Clarity Act”
“Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act.” Trump said that in the Oval Office on Wednesday 19 August. Brad Garlinghouse was in the room. So were SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Acting Chairman Michael Selig. The chief executives of Nasdaq, Coinbase and Robinhood were there, and Kraken and ICE sent theirs as well (CoinDesk).
XRP’s own securities question was settled in 2023. Judge Analisa Torres ruled on it and both appeals were later dropped. CLARITY decides the rulebook built around that ruling. It settles who regulates spot crypto trading in America, and where the CFTC’s authority starts and the SEC’s stops.
The new thing came two days later. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt told Coinage on Friday that the administration will not sit and wait for the Senate. He said the agencies “still have tremendous authority and powers available to them” if the bill fails. His phrase for their readiness was “locked and loaded”. He promised “a lot of rulemaking” either way, and said he was “as bullish as optimistic” on the vote itself (Stocktwits).
Then the arithmetic, which has not moved. The Senate returns on Monday 14 September. The cloture vote follows the next afternoon, at 2:15pm Eastern. That is 7:15pm UK. It needs 60 of the 100 senators, and it settles only whether the Senate may begin debating the bill. Republicans hold 53 seats, so 7 Democrats have to cross. 7 have publicly rejected the merged text over ethics rules, illicit finance provisions and oversight of decentralised finance.
Not everyone in that room agrees on the odds. Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong said on Thursday he was “pretty optimistic” of finding 60 votes. Polymarket, where people bet real money on political outcomes, put 2026 passage at 15.5 percent.
🔒 A Billion XRP Now Sits Inside the Funds, and Goldman Sachs Is the Largest Holder
The seven American spot XRP funds held 1,026,910,000 XRP on Saturday. That is the first time the total has been above a billion tokens. It is 1.03 percent of the 100 billion XRP that will ever exist. Their assets came to $1.4 billion, against $993.5 million a week earlier (xrp-insights).
New money arrived as well as a higher price. Net inflows for the week to Friday were $39.78 million. That is the strongest week since May. Friday alone brought $18.38 million, and the Bitwise fund took $16.89 million of it. August had managed $3.27 million in total up to the 16th (U.Today).
Most of the jump in assets is the price rather than the flows. XRP rose about 51 percent across the same 7 days. The flows are small against the base. $39.78 million into funds already holding $1.4 billion is under 3 percent.
The biggest name in that table came back this quarter. Goldman Sachs reported $86,506,129 across five XRP funds for the quarter ending 30 June. The filing landed on 14 August. Its two largest positions are $25.76 million in the Bitwise fund and $25.41 million in Franklin’s. Nobody else has disclosed more (SEC).
Four filings in a row describe a round trip. At the end of September 2025, before the spot funds began trading, Goldman reported nothing. At the end of December it held $152.2 million across four funds. At the end of March it held nothing. At the end of June it held $86.5 million across five.
The dates are what make this readable rather than exciting. Goldman runs more than $4 trillion. The position was rebuilt during a quarter in which XRP fell. It was disclosed six weeks after that quarter closed, so it says nothing about what the bank did during this week’s rally. Goldman has now built an XRP fund position from scratch twice in eight months.
💵 RLUSD Passed $2 Billion, and Ethereum Took Back the Lead
Ripple’s dollar token passed $2 billion in circulation on Friday 21 August. It launched in December 2024, which makes it the fastest growing stablecoin regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services. That regulator supervises it under a trust charter, and Ripple says every token in circulation is backed by dollar bank deposits and short term Treasury bills.
Supply moves in both directions. On the same day it crossed $2 billion, 10 million RLUSD were burned at Ripple’s treasury. A burn is what happens when a holder hands tokens back for dollars, so the circulating figure drops by the amount returned.
The growth did not land where an XRP holder would want it. On Friday, $989.34 million of RLUSD sat on Ethereum against $941.36 million on the XRP Ledger. The XRP Ledger had held the larger share since June. On Thursday alone Ripple issued 73.8 million RLUSD on Ethereum and 36.1 million on its own ledger (Crypto Economy).
The same week handed the XRP Ledger something to hold. On Thursday Ripple, Clearpool and Cicada Partners said they would build an institutional credit platform on the ledger. It would lend RLUSD to fintech and payments firms as working capital (CoinDesk).
Clearpool and Cicada bring the track record. Clearpool has processed more than $930 million of institutional loans. Cicada brings $860 million of underwriting experience. Ripple is joining as a liquidity provider on the same terms as every other investor.
None of the lending can run on the main ledger yet. The platform is built on two proposed amendments. They are the XLS-66 lending protocol and XLS-65 single asset vaults. Both still need approval from the validators who operate the network. The working demonstration sits on a test network today.
Seen on X
Sensei’s Insight: Twenty thousand likes on this one, and the figure that stuck with me is 67 million Americans holding crypto. Nearly one in four. Washington does not put on rooms like that for fringe industries, and this is the second time it has hosted this one. I have been bearish for a year, and I have said all along that the second half of a midterm year is when I start accumulating rather than fighting it. Wednesday is part of why. It does not change my chart read and I am still not chasing $1.70.
Sensei’s Insight: Sit with who posted this one. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020 and spent years arguing in court that XRP was a security. The chairman of that same agency spent Wednesday afternoon posting a video from the White House, with Ripple’s chief executive standing in the room behind him. Anyone who came into this market recently will not understand how strange that is to those of us who sat through the lawsuit. It puts no floor under the chart, and it did not stop the leverage flush on Saturday. Worth noticing anyway.
Debunked
The post came from Grok, X’s own assistant account, on Thursday 20 August, answering a question about what a large inflow would do to XRP. Its reply: “scaling that ratio to a $1B net inflow points to a multi-trillion market cap move. At current circulating supply that puts XRP in the $40 range.” Within a day “XRP to $40” was running as a headline in the trade press. The working takes one hour of an unusually thin order book, notes that $4.71 million of net inflows sat alongside a $12 billion change in market value, and multiplies that ratio by 212.
Market capitalisation is the price of one coin multiplied by the number in circulation. It is a sum rather than a pot of money, which is why the two figures in that ratio were never connected in the first place. Depth is the piece the model leaves out. A small order moves the price because few people are willing to sell near it, and a large order does not move it 212 times as far because more sellers appear the higher it goes. The week’s real numbers settle it. The spot funds took $39.78 million, more than eight times the figure being scaled, and XRP ended the week at $1.51. Forty dollars would put XRP at roughly $2.5 trillion, which is about what the entire crypto market is worth today.
The Polls
Last week’s poll asked where XRP would close this Sunday. 58% of you said below 90 cents, and another 25% said between 90 cents and a dollar. So 83 percent expected a lower price, and 8% picked the highest box on the list. It closed at $1.51, above every option I offered. That is what sentiment looks like at a low, and it is worth remembering the next time a chart makes you feel certain.
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).