XRP & Ripple Weekly News Review — Week of August 10–16, 2026

The week in one paragraph

This was the week the market finally said the quiet part out loud: XRP traded below a dollar for the first time in 635 days, closing the week at $0.9925 after printing a yearly low of $0.9874 on Friday. Beneath the price, four quieter things happened. A bridge lost 199,916 XRP in 97 minutes — and no ledger holder lost anything. Quarterly filings showed that the world's biggest banks own almost none of the XRP funds. Solana started trading on the XRP Ledger's own exchange. And Ripple prepared for three days in front of American regulators, 26 days before the Senate was scheduled to vote on the CLARITY Act. Every item below carries its source and date; my commentary follows each.

The week's data snapshot

Full metric-by-metric sourcing in the Weekly Data Report. This edition was revised on Sep 14, 2026 to replace estimated figures with sourced ones under our data policy.

The sixteen stories

1. XRP breaks a dollar for the first time in 635 days Market

At 10:00 AM ET on Tuesday, August 11, XRP printed 99.15 cents on Binance — the first trade below a dollar since November 16, 2024. The round-number streak, unbroken through the entire 2025 cycle, ended not with a crash but with a grind: a slow bleed from $1.06, which had already been lost as support on August 6.

My take: a level that holds for 635 days becomes the level everybody watches, which is exactly why breaking it matters less than the coverage suggested and more than bulls wanted. Round numbers are where alerts and resting orders cluster; the tape around them is information, not prophecy. The information here was bad but honest — and, as the following weeks showed, it was also the bottom.

2. The $0.9874 yearly low — and the first sub-$1 daily close Market

Buyers defended $1 twice during the week: the Tuesday dip to $0.9910 closed the day up 1.03%, and the Thursday drop to $0.9975 closed up 0.38%. The defense failed on Friday, August 14, when sellers pushed the token to a new yearly low of $0.9874 and the day closed below $1 — the first daily close under the level since the November 2024 rally reclaimed it. Saturday recovered above $1; Sunday fell back to $0.9901 and closed the week at $0.9925.

My take: weekly closing levels carry more weight in chart analysis than intraday pokes, and the first weekly close below $1 since November 2024 is a real technical event. But note the shape of the failure — repeated absorption, then capitulation on the lowest volume day of the week. That is exhaustion, not distribution. The Fibonacci map that matters next: $0.9874, then $0.9443 and $0.9226 if the floor fails.

3. One XRP briefly traded below one RLUSD Market / Stablecoin

At the Tuesday low, XRP traded below $1.00 while RLUSD — Ripple's dollar stablecoin, engineered to hold exactly $1 — held its peg, as Forbes and others noted. For a few hours, Ripple's own settlement token was worth more than the asset that pays the ledger's fees.

My take: symbolic, and that is precisely why it circulated. The honest read is mechanical: RLUSD's peg is enforced by reserves and arbitrage, XRP's price is set by an open market. A stablecoin doing its job next to a falling volatile asset is not a verdict on either — but the image stuck, and it illustrates the divergence between Ripple's business momentum and the token's market cycle better than any chart.

4. A bridge loses 199,916 XRP in 97 minutes — the ledger itself untouched Security

A cross-chain bridge lost 199,916 XRP in under two hours this week. The flaw was in the bridge's own software, not in the XRP Ledger; no ledger holder or RLUSD holder was affected, and the loss was confined to the bridge's locked inventory.

My take: this is the story the headline writer gets wrong and the reader deserves right. "XRPL bridge hacked" and "XRPL hacked" are different events, and the difference is the whole point of layered architecture. Fourteen years without a consensus incident is the track record of the ledger; application-layer risk is a separate column, and it stays separate.

5. JPMorgan's XRP fund position: $1,356 Institutional

Quarterly 13F disclosures landed this week, and the most-discussed line was small on purpose: JPMorgan disclosed roughly $1,356 in the Bitwise XRP ETF — about 113 shares, held by a bank running $5.1 trillion. Early reads of the filings show the largest US banks hold almost none of the XRP funds directly.

My take: the number went viral for the wrong reason. A $1,356 line is not a position, it is a test — an operational probe to verify the bank's systems can hold the product. The revealing data is the aggregate: institutional desks are still almost entirely absent from this complex, which is consistent with the retail-dominated flow profile (roughly 84% of inflows) that the ETF data keeps showing. The money that would move this market has not arrived yet.

6. Solana starts trading on the XRPL DEX Ecosystem / DeFi

SOL became tradable on the XRP Ledger's native decentralized exchange this week via a bridged issuance. The coverage carried a caveat worth amplifying: Axelar is the only legitimate issuer of the bridged token, and copycat issuances of the same ticker are the actual risk users need to check for.

My take: a major non-native asset quoting on XRPL's DEX is a milestone for the orderbook's credibility — and a fresh attack surface for impersonation. The lesson generalizes: on a ledger where anyone can issue anything, the issuer line is the security model. Check it before every trade; the ledger will not check it for you.

7. The ETF flow drought, quantified Market & ETF

The monthly flow series told the week's macro story in four numbers: $131.94M (May), $59.46M (June), $27.29M (July) — and roughly $3.27M for the first half of August, $2.25M of which arrived on a single day. Total net assets across the seven listed funds slipped to about $942M from a peak above $1.25B, per CryptoSlate's compilation of SoSoValue data.

My take: a spot ETF is a wrapper that must buy the real asset when money arrives, so the drought was a direct, mechanical removal of the market's largest incremental buyer. That is most of the price story right there. What the week could not show — and what the following two weeks proved — is that droughts in this complex end abruptly when the price gives flow desks a reason to re-engage.

8. Santiment: 32 new millionaire wallets in three months — while price fell 29% On-chain

Blockchain analytics platform Santiment counted 32 new wallets holding at least 1 million XRP over a roughly three-month window in which XRP's market value fell about 29%. The firm's caveat travels with the number: one owner can run many wallets, so treat it as a hint, not a headcount.

My take: accumulation into weakness is the oldest pattern in markets and the hardest one to fake at this sample size. The honest framing: large holders were re-engaging while the retail long tail shrank — the same concentration signature the network's activity data shows. Signals like this are why the bottom, when it came, was made by big wallets rather than sentiment.

9. XRPL activity runs opposite to price Network

On-chain usage and price diverged sharply. Average daily active addresses ran at roughly 35,700 in August to date versus ~26,400 in July (+33%), with August 11 the network's busiest day in half a year. On Friday the ledger logged 49,929 active addresses in 24 hours — its highest in over two months and about 3% above the 48,453 it managed in May, when XRP traded above $1.54. Santiment attributed the spike primarily to existing holders re-engaging rather than new wallet creation.

My take: "more people used the ledger at a dollar than at $1.54" is the single most valuable sentence written about XRP this week. Price measures attention; usage measures utility. When they decouple this way — usage up as price bottoms — the reconciliation eventually comes from the price side.

10. Ripple's week ahead in Washington: three days, three venues Regulation

The week's closing item was a schedule: Ripple was set to spend three days in front of American regulators the following week — a Jackson Hole-adjacent policy forum on Tuesday, the White House crypto summit on Wednesday, and the CFTC on Thursday — with the Senate's CLARITY Act cloture vote 26 days out.

My take: scheduling is signal. A payments company that gets three separate regulatory audiences in one week is a company whose primary asset is now regulatory standing, and the CLARITY vote countdown made every appearance a live rehearsal for the argument that decides the bill.

11. Thune files cloture on the CLARITY Act before the recess Regulation

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the CLARITY Act before the August recess, formally setting up a procedural vote for when senators returned — the step that converts a stalled bill into a scheduled one. The vote was later fixed for September 15 at 2:15 PM ET, requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster against a Republican conference holding 53 seats.

My take: cloture filings are the least glamorous and most consequential documents in legislative crypto. Filing before the recess meant the calendar, not the commentary, would decide the bill's momentum — and it put a hard date on the industry's biggest open question.

12. Liquidations stay small — leverage already flushed Derivatives

Derivatives stress around the breakdown was modest: 24-hour liquidations ran at about $1.85M on August 12–13, of which $1.77M — the overwhelming majority — were long positions. The aggregate long/short ratio sat at 0.92 while Binance's account-level ratio read 3.02, a divergence that shows sentiment fragmentation across venues rather than a crowded book.

My take: a 29% quarterly drawdown that produces under $2M of daily liquidations is a market that already reset its leverage earlier in the decline. That is why the break of $1 came with a whimper instead of a cascade — and why the subsequent rally, when it came, was built on rebuilding positioning rather than clearing it.

13. XRP at −69% from its January 2025 peak Market

The August 12 daily close near $1.00 marked the lowest print since November 2024 — roughly 69% below the January 2025 peak near $3.30 that market desks used as their cycle reference. (Against the all-time high of $3.65 recorded in July 2025 on CoinGecko, the drawdown read even deeper.)

My take: drawdown context is the least exciting and most used number in the file. A two-thirds drawdown from a cycle peak is where generational dispersion happens: the tourists leave, the bookbuilders arrive. Every institutional allocation memo that crossed my desk in September opened with this number — as context, then as opportunity.

14. The support ladder that broke — and what replaced it Technical

The week completed a pattern worth recording. From mid-to-late June, XRP repeatedly tested $1.1304 as support, lost it on June 23, and watched it become resistance. From late July, the same sequence played out at $1.06, lost on August 6. The dollar was the next rung. Below it, the Fibonacci ladder offered $0.9874 (the yearly low), then $0.9443 and $0.9226; daily RSI read 36.65 — bearish pressure, not yet oversold.

My take: support-into-resistance sequences are the market's way of marking where sellers actually live. The useful discipline is not predicting the next rung but noting that each break came on declining volume — a sequence that ends when the sellers run out, which is what the following week's $1.00→$1.70 move turned out to be.

15. The macro backdrop: $2.23T total market, Bitcoin dominance 57.8% Macro

Total crypto market value fell about 2.5% on the week to $2.23 trillion, Bitcoin dominance rose to 57.8%, and sentiment printed 34 on the Fear & Greed Index — solidly in Fear. XRP's breakdown happened inside a market-wide risk-off week, not against it.

My take: attribution matters. A token breaking a 635-day level while Bitcoin dominance rises is a beta event with a token-specific headline. The honest ledger entry: the dollar break was two parts market beta, one part XRP's own flow drought. The follow-through, in both directions, would be decided by the flow side.

16. Escrow mechanics set the monthly supply drumbeat Supply

The month's structural backdrop stayed on schedule: Ripple unlocks 1 billion XRP from escrow on the first day of each month and re-locks most of it, leaving roughly 300 million tokens net added to circulation per month — a cadence that, as later coverage of the month noted, quietly cancels out much of what the ETFs absorb when flows are small.

My take: in a drought week, this mechanism is the bear case's favorite exhibit: supply dribbles out while buyers vanish. In the record-flow weeks that followed, the same mechanism became the reason fund accumulation did not instantly squeeze price. Same fact, opposite narratives — which is how you know it is a constant, not a catalyst.

Three trends I'm watching from this week

1. Usage and price have decoupled. Active addresses at a two-month high (+3% above the May reading at $1.54) while price printed a yearly low. The last time these series disagreed this loudly, price followed usage within weeks.
2. The ETF buyer is absent — and its absence is the story. $3.27M in half a month against a $1.25B peak book. Everything about the tape right now is what a market without its marginal buyer looks like. The re-entry, when it comes, will be the trade of the quarter.
3. The regulatory calendar has a hard date. Cloture filed, 26 days out, three Ripple regulatory appearances in one week. The story shifts from "will there be a vote" to "what 60 votes look like."

What I'm watching next week

Whether $0.9874 holds as the floor (the Fibonacci rungs below — $0.9443, $0.9226 — are the map if it fails), whether the flow drought extends into a fourth month, Ripple's three Washington appearances, and the first post-recess read on CLARITY vote-counting. If you follow one thing, follow the ETF flow line: it is the difference between this week's breakdown being a bottom or a waypoint.

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Related reading

• XRP Ledger Weekly Data Report — Week of August 10–16, 2026
• The Flow Drought: Reading XRP ETF Flows Before the August Record
• XRP & Ripple Weekly News Review — Week of August 17–23, 2026