Community Trust ScoreVerified
XRP dropped to $1.20 on Tuesday. That’s a four-month low, and it landed on the token’s 14th birthday — which is either poetic or just painful, depending on who you ask.
The decline wiped out roughly $30 million in leveraged positions. Market cap fell from above $85 billion to below $75 billion in a matter of days, and that was enough for USDC to slide past XRP into fifth place on CoinGecko’s rankings. Pretty significant, given XRP had held that spot for a while.
The last time XRP was this cheap was early February, when it briefly dipped just above $1.10.
Failed Breakouts and Falling Ranks
The selloff didn’t come out of nowhere. XRP had been struggling against resistance between $1.50 and $1.60 for weeks. The latest rejection came in mid-May, when it touched $1.55 before pulling back hard. That was basically the last real shot at a breakout, and it didn’t stick. Each failed attempt chipped away at confidence, and the accumulated pressure finally broke through support.
Before all of this, XRP had actually held above $1.30 pretty consistently — going back to before the 2024 U.S. presidential elections. That’s a long stretch of relative stability, which makes the current slide feel sharper by comparison. Traders who’d grown comfortable with that floor got caught off guard.
The $30 million in liquidations mostly hit leveraged longs. When a token drops this fast, those positions get wiped automatically, and that forced selling tends to accelerate the move. It’s a feedback loop the crypto market has seen plenty of times, and XRP walked right into it.
USDC overtaking XRP in market cap rankings is a notable shift. Stablecoins don’t usually climb the charts because of price appreciation — they do it when other assets fall. That’s basically what happened here.
XRP Turns 14 in a Rough Market
The timing adds an odd layer to all of this. Fourteen years ago, Ripple co-founder Arthur Britto released the code that created 100 billion XRP tokens. He’d been working alongside David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb since 2011, and that code drop marked the formal beginning of what Ripple would become. It’s a real milestone in crypto history — one of the earlier major token launches, predating a lot of the infrastructure the industry now takes for granted.
Celebrating that anniversary with a four-month price low and a market cap slide of more than $10 billion wasn’t exactly the plan.
Ripple hasn’t said anything publicly about the drop. No statement, no strategic response, nothing. That silence leaves traders guessing, and in a market this sensitive to narrative, guessing tends to go badly. It’s unclear whether the company sees current prices as a buying opportunity, a temporary dip, or something more structurally concerning. Probably all three, depending on who you ask inside the building.
What Analysts Are Watching Now
Some analysts think the slide isn’t done. Predictions circulating in the market put a potential floor around $1.14 — which would be close to the February low of just above $1.10. That’s not a catastrophic number in absolute terms, but it would mean XRP has given back most of the gains it built up over the past several months.
The resistance zone between $1.50 and $1.60 now looks like a ceiling that’s going to be hard to crack without a meaningful catalyst. And right now, there’s no obvious catalyst on the horizon. No major product announcement from Ripple, no regulatory clarity that would specifically boost XRP’s case, no obvious macro tailwind that targets this asset over others.
Cross-border payments — XRP’s core use case — remain a genuine need globally. That hasn’t changed. But the gap between fundamental utility and short-term price action can stay wide for a long time in crypto, and XRP knows that better than most tokens.
The asset has been through worse. The multi-year SEC lawsuit dragged it through price levels far below where it sits today. It survived that, and the eventual legal resolution gave it a real bounce. But that kind of catalyst doesn’t repeat on a schedule.
For now, the market cap sits below $75 billion, USDC holds fifth place, and the next support level that matters is somewhere around $1.14.
Hub: USDC price, news, and analysis
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did XRP drop to a four-month low?
XRP fell to $1.20 after a series of failed breakout attempts between $1.50 and $1.60, with the latest rejection occurring in mid-May when it reached $1.55, triggering approximately $30 million in liquidations.
Has XRP lost its top-five cryptocurrency ranking?
Yes — XRP’s market cap fell from above $85 billion to below $75 billion, allowing USDC to surpass it as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap per CoinGecko.
