XRP Goes Flat at $1.29: A Pause After a Month of Selling

XRP spent the past seven days doing very little, and that is worth noting in itself. After two weeks of falling prices, the token closed the week at $1.29, up a mere 0.02% on the seven-day view. Selling pressure did not intensify, but buyers did not take control either.

This kind of week is easy to overlook. There is no sharp move to describe and no obvious breakout to chart. Yet after a 16.2% decline over 30 days, a flat week tells us something about how the market is behaving. This analysis looks at what the data shows, where the structure stands, and which headlines were in the background.

As always, this is an observation of market structure, not a forecast and not advice.

Price Action This Week

XRP trades at $1.29 with a market capitalization of about $81.8 billion, which keeps it in fifth place among crypto assets by that measure. The weekly change of +0.02% is effectively zero, so the price today is almost identical to the price a week ago.

The longer windows tell a different story:

• 7 days: +0.02%
• 14 days: -7.29%
• 30 days: -16.24%

Taken together, these numbers describe a decline that happened mostly in the earlier part of the 30-day window and the first half of the 14-day window. The last seven days did not add to the damage. That is the main change in character this week: the price moved from steady decline to sideways drift.

We can reconstruct approximate reference prices from these percentage changes. Fourteen days ago XRP was trading near $1.39, and thirty days ago it was near $1.54. These are derived figures, not exact prints, but they give a useful picture of the path. The market has given back roughly 25 cents over the month, and the most recent week has not recovered any of it.

It is also worth being honest about what a flat week can and cannot mean. Flat can be the pause before a further decline. It can be the base-building phase before a recovery. It can also simply be a quiet period with no information in it. The data from a single week cannot separate these cases, and we do not try to.

Market Structure

The medium-term trend remains bearish. Lower prices over 14 and 30 days define that trend, and one flat week does not reverse it. What the flat week does is change the question. Last week's question was how far the decline would run. This week's question is whether the price can hold the current level long enough to form a stable base.

Levels to Watch

Because the briefing did not include a confirmed swing low, we rely on the derived reference prices and the current price:

• Resistance near $1.39: This is roughly where XRP traded 14 days ago. It is the first level where sellers from the earlier part of the decline may have unfinished business. A move back above this area would be the first structural sign of recovery.
• Resistance near $1.54: The approximate price 30 days ago. This is a more distant marker, and it sits about 19% above the current price. It matters mostly as a measure of how much ground the month of selling covered.
• Support at $1.29: The current base. It has held for a week, but a level that has only held for a week is not yet a proven level. No swing low was supplied, so anyone studying the chart should confirm where recent lows actually sit before drawing conclusions.

The distance between the current price and the first resistance is roughly 8%, which is not large in absolute terms. Whether the market can cover that distance depends on participation, and we turn to that below.

The Distance From the High

XRP remains 64.6% below the all-time high reference of $3.65 in the data feed. The widely cited peak from January 2018 is $3.84, which would make the gap slightly wider, closer to 66%. Either way, the conclusion is the same: XRP has not made a new all-time high this cycle, and the ATH gap remains a defining structural feature.

This matters because it frames the whole discussion. The token is not trading in a price-discovery environment. It is trading in a range that has persisted through a major regulatory resolution and the arrival of spot ETFs. Those were events many participants expected to change the price structure, yet the price is still in the neighborhood of $1.30 to $1.50 that has defined much of early 2026.

What Has Changed, and What Has Not

It is useful to separate structural changes from price changes. The SEC case was fully resolved in August 2025, when both parties withdrew their appeals and the settlement was set at $50 million. Spot XRP ETFs have traded in the U.S. since November 2025, beginning with the Canary Capital product and followed by several large issuers. Institutional access is no longer blocked by regulation.

Those are real changes to the market's plumbing. They do not guarantee a particular price path, and they do not remove the other forces acting on the token, including the monthly escrow release of up to 1 billion XRP and the wider crypto environment. The structure has improved while the price has stayed range-bound, and both facts need to be held at once.

Volume and Participation

XRP recorded about $1.34 billion in 24-hour trading volume. Against a market cap of $81.8 billion, that is a turnover ratio of roughly 1.6%. For a top-five asset, that is a moderate figure, neither a sign of panic nor a sign of enthusiasm.

This fits the price picture. A flat week with moderate volume is what a market looks like when buyers and sellers are roughly balanced. If the flat price had come with a surge in volume, we might read it as heavy two-way activity meeting at one price. If it had come with very thin volume, we might read it as disengagement. The actual reading sits between those two, closer to quiet balance.

One point of caution is that a single 24-hour volume figure is a snapshot, not a trend. We do not have the prior week's volume in this briefing, so we cannot say whether participation is rising or falling. What we can say is that the volume is adequate to support the current price and that nothing in it points to forced selling.

For a recovery to look credible in the data, the usual pattern is that volume expands as price moves through resistance. A reclaim of $1.39 on thin volume would carry less weight than a reclaim on rising volume. Readers following the market can watch for that combination rather than the price alone.

Sentiment Indicators

The Fear & Greed Index reads 54, which is Neutral. It was 51 yesterday and 53 a week ago. The change is modest and moves in the same direction as the flat price: stable, slightly less fearful, nowhere near euphoric.

This is a useful cross-check. After a 16% monthly decline, one might expect sentiment readings to sit deep in fear territory. They do not. That can mean the decline was orderly rather than panicked, or it can mean that sentiment indices lag the price. We note it without leaning on it, because sentiment gauges are blunt tools.

The Bitcoin Backdrop

The broader backdrop is less neutral. The Bitcoin regime is classified as bearish, with BTC at about $80,094. Bitcoin ETFs recorded $635 million in outflows as October turned negative.

Altcoins rarely trade in isolation from Bitcoin, and XRP is no exception. When the largest asset is under pressure and capital is leaving its ETF products, it is harder for other assets to attract fresh inflows. This does not explain every move in XRP, but it is a headwind that appears in the data and deserves a place in the analysis.

It also helps explain why a flat week for XRP may be a relatively good outcome. Holding a price level while the leading asset faces outflows is not the same as failing to hold it.

News and Narrative

Several headlines surrounded the XRP ecosystem this week. They differ in weight, so we take them in order of how directly they relate to the token.

Franklin Templeton Adds $150 Million to the XRP Ledger

The most material headline is that Franklin Templeton added $150 million in fund shares to the XRP Ledger. The shares were all held in a single wallet.

Two parts of this story deserve careful reading. First, the size and the name matter. A large, established asset manager placing fund shares on the XRP Ledger is the kind of institutional adoption signal that supporters of the network have long pointed to. Franklin Templeton is also one of the issuers that followed Canary Capital into the spot XRP ETF market, so its involvement with the ecosystem now runs through more than one channel.

Second, the detail about a single wallet is a reminder to read such figures precisely. Tokenized fund shares on a ledger are a use of the network, not a purchase of XRP itself. The shares sit on the ledger as assets, and their presence does not by itself create buying demand for the token. Whether activity of this kind eventually translates into more use of XRP as a bridge or fee asset is a separate question that this single headline cannot answer.

The price response this week was flat, which is consistent with a market that treats the news as a positive but not as a catalyst.

Ledger Development: The fixCleanup3_4_0 Amendment

On the technical side, the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment gained enough validator support after a vote reset. The earliest activation date is November 4.

Amendments like this are part of the ordinary maintenance of the ledger. They rarely move markets, and this one is classified as neutral. The date is worth noting simply because it falls within the next two weeks, and a scheduled activation is a concrete event on the calendar.

Custody and Banking

A study from BCG, commissioned by Ripple, argues that banks' custody decisions will shape their wider digital asset plans. The study comes from a party with an interest in the conclusion, so it should be read as an argument rather than as independent research.

The underlying idea is nonetheless reasonable. Custody is often the first practical hurdle for a regulated institution, and decisions made there tend to determine which assets and networks a bank is able to support later. This is a structural theme, not a trading signal, and it operates on a timescale of years rather than weeks.

Cautionary Headlines

Two items pointed the other way. The SEC flagged tokenization as a high-risk area for its 2027 examinations. This is relevant because tokenization is exactly the use case the Franklin Templeton headline represents. Regulatory attention does not mean the activity is prohibited, but it does indicate that firms operating in the area should expect scrutiny. The resolved XRP case does not shield the wider category from examination.

Separately, a bounty hack at Cysic led to funds being routed through Tornado Cash. This is not an XRP-specific event, but security incidents of this kind tend to weigh on general market sentiment and on regulatory attitudes toward mixing services.

Reading the news as a whole, the week contained one clear positive, one neutral technical item, one structural argument, and two cautionary notes. That mix is consistent with a market that has little reason to move decisively in either direction.

Week Ahead

There are no certainties here, but there are things worth watching.

Price levels. The first marker is whether $1.29 continues to hold. A second week of sideways trading would strengthen the case that a base is forming. A clean break below it would suggest that the pause was temporary. On the upside, $1.39 is the level that would signal the first real change in the trend, and $1.54 is the more distant reference.

Volume behavior. Moves through either boundary are more informative when accompanied by changing volume. We will be watching whether the roughly $1.3 billion daily figure holds, rises, or fades.

Bitcoin and ETF flows. With BTC in a bearish regime and ETF outflows reported at the start of the month, the direction of flows into Bitcoin products will likely influence the whole sector. A stabilization there would remove a headwind. Further outflows would keep it in place.

Scheduled events. The earliest activation date for the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment is November 4. Beyond that, the continuing escrow release of up to 1 billion XRP each month remains a background feature of supply, as it has been for years.

Sentiment. The Fear & Greed reading of 54 is neutral and slightly improved. A sustained move in either direction would be more informative than a single day's change.

Closing Observation

XRP ends the week where it began, at $1.29, with a bearish medium-term trend, a neutral sentiment reading, and a broader market that is not offering much support. The most notable development is not a price move but a pause. The market has stopped falling for now, and the question for the coming weeks is whether the pause turns into a base or into a rest stop.

The structural facts remain unchanged. The SEC case is fully resolved, spot ETFs are trading, and the distance to the all-time high remains roughly two-thirds of the current price level. Those facts frame the market, while the weekly data shows how it is behaving inside that frame.

We will revisit the levels and the volume picture next week.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice.