XRP fell below $1 on August 11, 2026, touching $0.9952 for the first time since November 2024. The token is now 72% below its July 2025 peak of $3.65 and has lost 46% since January 2026. As of August 18, it trades at approximately $1.003 with a market capitalization of $62.8 billion, ranking sixt...
"Not looking good." — Boaz Sobrado, Forbes contributor, on Standard Chartered's XRP ETF forecast miss
XRP fell below $1 on August 11, 2026, touching $0.9952 for the first time since November 2024. The token is now 72% below its July 2025 peak of $3.65 and has lost 46% since January 2026. As of August 18, it trades at approximately $1.003 with a market capitalization of $62.8 billion, ranking sixth among all cryptocurrencies — down from fourth as recently as May.
The decline is not attributable to a single event. Five compounding factors drove the sell-off: a 93% collapse in weekly XRP ETF inflows, the U.S. Senate's deferral of the CLARITY Act to September, a Coreum bridge exploit that drained 200,000 XRP, deteriorating on-chain activity on the XRP Ledger, and broad macro headwinds that have suppressed risk appetite across crypto markets. Despite Ripple's methodical expansion of its RLUSD stablecoin to $1.71 billion in supply, the token's price action has decoupled from the company's operational progress.
XRP reached $3.65 on July 18, 2025, its highest level since January 2018 and less than 5% short of the $3.84 all-time high set during the prior cycle. The rally was fueled by the resolution of the SEC enforcement action — Ripple agreed to a $125 million civil penalty, and Judge Analisa Torres's 2023 ruling that secondary-market XRP sales do not constitute securities transactions was preserved — and by the November 2025 launch of spot XRP ETFs in the United States.
The unwind began in Q4 2025. By January 2026, XRP was trading at approximately $1.85. It fell to $1.16 by February, prompting Standard Chartered to slash its year-end target by 65%, from $8.00 to $2.80 — its largest downward revision for any crypto asset it covers. XRP continued to bleed, hitting $1.04 by June 30, 2026.
On August 11, the token breached $1 intraday, reaching $0.9952. According to Benzinga, the immediate trigger was the Coreum bridge exploit (discussed below), which compounded existing selling pressure from ETF redemptions and the CLARITY Act delay. XRP has since reclaimed $1 on a closing basis but has failed to sustain any recovery above $1.08. Negative social sentiment hit a three-month high on August 15, according to data tracked by CryptoTimes.
U.S. spot XRP ETFs launched on November 13, 2025. JPMorgan and Standard Chartered projected $4 billion to $8 billion in first-year inflows. Nine months later, cumulative net inflows stand at $1.51 billion — leaving three months to capture another $6.49 billion to meet the high end of the forecast.
The trajectory is moving in the wrong direction. Monthly net inflows peaked during the launch period and have since collapsed:
| Period | Net Inflows | |---|---| | Launch month (Nov 2025) | ~$670M (estimated from 96% decline) | | May 2026 | $131.94M | | June 2026 | $59.46M | | July 2026 | $27.29M | | August 1–10, 2026 | $3.27M |
Weekly inflows for the week ending August 8 were $1.01 million, a 93% decline from the prior week's $14.86 million. On August 5, U.S. spot XRP ETFs recorded $3.58 million in net outflows — the first negative flow day since July 8.
Fund-level data paints a starker picture. The 21Shares XRP ETF (TOXR) lost 54.4% of its net assets in H1 2026, falling from $247.7 million to $112.9 million. The decline was split between price depreciation (XRP fell 42.9% to $1.04 over the period) and $49.5 million in negative net capital transactions — $75 million in redemptions against $25.5 million in creations. The fund locked in $13.36 million in realized losses and remains the only U.S. spot XRP ETF with negative cumulative flows since inception, at approximately -$20 million.
Canary's XRP ETF lost $81.6 million as token prices declined. Bitwise's fund held 296.7 million XRP as of August 9; Franklin's XRPZ held 240 million XRP as of August 6. Allocators appear to be in wait-and-see mode until the CLARITY Act's Senate path resolves.
The Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, which would formalize the classification of XRP as a commodity for secondary-market transactions, was set aside by the U.S. Senate on July 28, 2026. Senate Majority Leader John Thune redirected floor time toward a Russia sanctions bill and federal nominations. The earliest possible vote is now September 14, the last viable window before midterm election dynamics consume the legislative calendar.
XRP slid to $1.06 on July 27 when the delay was announced and has traded in a $1.00–$1.08 range since. According to a Polymarket prediction market, the probability of the CLARITY Act passing in 2026 stands at approximately 30%.
The legislative stall matters to XRP specifically because the bill would codify Judge Torres's 2023 ruling into statute, providing institutional investors with the regulatory certainty that many cite as a precondition for material allocation. Without it, XRP occupies a legal gray zone where the court ruling holds but statutory clarity remains absent — a distinction that compliance departments at large asset managers treat as meaningful.
Monthly ETF inflow data tracks the legislative momentum closely: $131.94 million in May (peak Senate committee activity), $59.46 million in June (committee passed, floor vote expected), $27.29 million in July (floor vote deferred), and $3.27 million in the first ten days of August (bill shelved).
On August 9, an attacker drained 199,916 XRP — worth approximately $200,000 — from the Coreum cross-chain bridge in 94 transactions over 97 minutes. The bridge's reserve wallet fell from 200,410 XRP to 493.5 XRP, a 99.7% depletion.
The exploit did not involve stolen private keys or a protocol-level vulnerability. According to analysis published by Bitrue and DailyCoin, the attacker exploited a flaw in the bridge's relayer software: the system trusted a transaction memo field to verify deposit authenticity rather than checking the actual payment destination. The attacker sent tokens between two wallets they controlled while attaching a fake deposit label. The bridge software misread the transaction as a legitimate deposit and credited the attacker with XRP they never sent.
Tx, the bridge operator, patched the vulnerable code, engaged blockchain forensics specialists, and filed a complaint with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. The dollar value of the exploit was modest in absolute terms, but its timing — coinciding with existing bearish sentiment, ETF outflows, and the CLARITY Act delay — amplified its impact on XRP's price. The breach pushed XRP below $1 for the first time in nearly two years.
The incident underscores a persistent risk in cross-chain infrastructure: bridge exploits remain the most economically damaging attack vector in crypto, and even small breaches can catalyze outsized market reactions in low-liquidity conditions.
XRP Ledger usage metrics have deteriorated across every measurable dimension in 2026:
The activity data complicates the narrative that XRP Ledger is gaining traction as a payments and tokenization network. While Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin supply has grown, the broader network is losing users at a rate that raises questions about the ledger's competitive positioning against Ethereum, Solana, and newer payment-oriented chains.
Against the backdrop of XRP's price decline, Ripple has continued expanding RLUSD, its dollar-pegged stablecoin on the XRP Ledger. On August 17, Ripple minted 10 million additional RLUSD tokens, pushing total circulating supply past $1.71 billion. RLUSD now accounts for more than 50% of total stablecoin supply on XRPL, with approximately $58 million in 24-hour trading volume.
Ripple partnered with Notabene in July to integrate RLUSD into the Notabene Flow business-to-business payments platform and secured regulatory approvals in Japan and Turkey. The stablecoin's growth trajectory — methodical supply expansion, institutional payment partnerships, compliance-first positioning — contrasts with XRP's deteriorating price and market metrics.
This divergence is instructive. RLUSD's success as a product does not automatically translate into demand for XRP as a token. The stablecoin operates on the XRP Ledger but does not require users to hold or transact in XRP. The disconnect highlights a structural question facing XRP holders: whether Ripple's corporate progress generates economic value for the token or primarily for Ripple's equity holders and RLUSD users.
XRP's breach of $1 is the convergence of five distinct but reinforcing pressures: institutional capital withdrawal via ETF redemptions, legislative uncertainty from the CLARITY Act delay, a confidence-damaging bridge exploit, collapsing on-chain usage, and a structural disconnect between Ripple's corporate progress and XRP token economics.
The token retains its position as the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and remains the only altcoin to hold a top-10 ranking continuously since 2014. The SEC case is resolved, RLUSD is growing, and the CLARITY Act — if passed — would remove the last major source of regulatory ambiguity.
But the data through mid-August 2026 shows a market that has priced out the optimistic scenarios embedded in last year's ETF launch rally. ETF inflows have flatlined. On-chain activity is at 2026 lows. And the legislative catalyst that could reignite institutional interest faces long odds before midterms. For XRP, the path from $1 back to $3.65 requires a reversal on multiple fronts simultaneously — a combination that current data does not support.