XRP staged a strong rally on Friday, rising about 18% in 24 hours to trade near $1.49 after a deep sell-off a day earlier made it the worst performer among major tokens.
The move came as bitcoin briefly rose above $70,000 in US morning hours, reversing Thursday’s sharp decline ahead of the weekend.
The rejection came after XRP collapsed to around $1.14 in the previous session, a move that triggered heavy liquidations and weeded out traders who had leaned too heavily on leverage.
Data shows short liquidations of about $26 million in the past 24 hours, compared with about $30 million in longs from earlier Thursday.
That imbalance matters. This suggests that the market did not so much react to fresh bad news as it mechanically removed bullish bets as prices fell. As these positions were forced to close, the selling pressure subsided and XRP was able to rebound quickly.
The recovery also comes at an awkward time for XRP’s broader narrative. Ripple and its ecosystem have spent the last week pitching a more institutional future for the XRP Ledger, including plans for permissioned markets, lending and privacy tools.
Flare, a closely watched project that attempts to bring DeFi-style utility to XRP through FXRP, also expanded institutional access through custodian firm Hex Trust.
But none of that helped XRP sentiment as the market crashed.
So Friday’s rally looks less like investors suddenly buying into the “institutional DeFi” pitch and more like a classic crypto snapback: a steep drop, a leverage wipeout, and then a quick recovery once the forced sellers are gone.
Meanwhile, a ratio of bullish versus bearish bets on futures tracking XRP shows that retail lending has been flushed, but major traders leaned the other way.
On Binance, the overall account-based long/short ratio is 2.13 as of Friday, meaning there were about 2x more accounts placed long than short. It is usually a sign of crowded bullish positioning – many smaller traders are anticipating a rejection point.
But at the same time, Binance’s top trader long/short (positions) is ~0.73, which means that the biggest traders on Binance were net short.
This split suggests that XRP’s dump was no accident: it likely ran into a market where smaller traders were stubbornly long, while larger players were positioned to take advantage of a flush.
And when those longs were cleared, XRP did what it usually does after a wipeout: it bounced back violently because there wasn’t much selling left.
