XRP is down 32% since US President Donald Trump’s January inauguration, outpacing declines throughout the broader cryptocurrency market.
But that doesn’t mean XRP holders are in the red, necessarily.
Crypto investors who bought XRP during the peak of the crypto market rally in December are still comfortably in profits, data from Glassnode shows.
Glassnode’s realised price by age, a metric that indicates whether investors bought coins cheaply enough to currently be profitable, shows XRP buyers from the post-election mania are 11% higher despite the asset’s price slump since then.
Those profits may grow even bigger if optimistic XRP bets among market analysts and traders materialise.
Meanwhile, those who bought Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana during the same period are sitting on huge losses.
The same metric puts the losses for Solana investors at 28% lower, and Ethereum buyers at a decline of 36%.
The key ingredient for wins with XRP is that its price has mostly held above $2.14, which is the average price at which recent investors from the last six months bought the cryptocurrency.
For Bitcoin and the others, it’s the reverse; their current price trails the average buying cost.
XRP traded at $2.21 on Thursday, a 3% uptick in the last 24 hours.
Even when it crashed to $1.68 in early April amid the market turmoil caused by Trump’s hefty tariffs, it rebounded quickly and surged almost 40% within three weeks.
The big winners? Whales who spread out their token buys to flatten their average cost basis, meaning the price at which they acquired their tokens.
Most retail buyers, however, bought at or near the top of the XRP price between December and January.
Last month, Glassnode analysts said capital influx into XRP has declined since February, an indication of a slowdown in speculative interest.
With fewer buyers coming in and the lack of a new narrative to reignite interest, XRP’s price could slide lower than the average cost basis of recent investors, which would mean huge losses, even for whales.
Meanwhile, market participants are split on XRP’s short-term price trajectory.
Traders are piling into long bets on XRP perpetuals ― futures contracts without expirations. There are three times as much open interest in XRP longs than shorts.
It’s also the same for options traders who flipped bullish in May and are stacking optimistic calls that XRP won’t fall below $2.2 this month.
Standard Chartered crypto analyst Geoffrey Kendrick told DL News this week that he’s sticking to his April prediction that XRP will hit $5.50 by the end of 2025.
He says it will reach $8.00 by the end of 2026, $10.40 by the end of 2027, and $12.25 by the end of 2029.
But crypto bettors aren’t sold. Data from Polymarket has crypto bettors predicting a 51% chance that XRP won’t end May on a high.
Another popular bet on the platform gives XRP an 82% chance of dropping as low as $2 this month.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
