Crypto
XRP fell 27% while RLUSD crossed $2.3 billion and nobody blinked
Ripple’s stablecoin has grown 1,278% this year while XRP shed more than a quarter of its value. The network is busier than ever, but the token capturing that activity has a dollar sign and a peg.
Summary
- RLUSD market cap hit $2.32 billion with cumulative volume surpassing $9 billion, a 1,278% increase year to date, while XRP dropped 27% over the same period to trade near $1.39.
- The XRP Ledger processes 2.4 million daily transactions, up 21% year over year, and DEX volume surged 79%, yet active accounts fell 40%, pointing to fewer but larger participants.
- Seven spot XRP ETFs approved in March 2026 have pulled in $1.68 billion in cumulative inflows, with August alone contributing $153 million to $159 million, the best month since launch.
- RLUSD supply on the XRP Ledger jumped from 18.4% of total issuance at the start of 2026 to 58.9% today, with $963 million now sitting on XRPL and $1.1 billion on Ethereum.
- Institutional integrations, including JPMorgan, Mastercard, Convera, and Interactive Brokers, have overwhelmingly adopted RLUSD for settlement, not XRP, raising the question of whether the token is becoming a sidecar to its own ecosystem.
The numbers tell two contradictory stories about the same network. XRP started 2026 near $1.90, slid to a July low of $1.06, bounced to $1.55 in August, and then drifted back to $1.36. Down 27% on the year. That is the kind of chart that makes retail traders close their apps and check back in six months.
But the infrastructure underneath that falling price is having its best year. The XRP Ledger is settling more transactions than at any point since the 2021 bull run. RLUSD, barely seven months old, already ranks among the ten largest stablecoins by market capitalization. Ripple signed deals with payment processors that move $190 billion per year. The Bank for International Settlements published a working paper using the XRP Ledger for cryptographic proof of integrity.
None of this lifted the token price. And that contradiction is the story worth unpacking, because it reveals something about XRP that the community has been reluctant to confront: the network’s success and the token’s performance may no longer be the same story.
The stablecoin that ate the narrative
RLUSD launched in late 2025 as a compliance-first stablecoin designed to slot into existing banking infrastructure. Ripple positioned it as the settlement layer for cross-border payments, the exact use case that XRP was supposed to own. The company argued the two assets were complementary. Seven months of market data suggest otherwise.
The growth curve speaks for itself. RLUSD crossed $1 billion in market cap in the spring, then $2 billion on August 25, and sits at $2.32 billion today. Cumulative trading volume has passed $9 billion. The growth rate, 1,278% year to date, is the kind of number that would dominate crypto headlines if it belonged to a token people could speculate on. But a stablecoin pegged to one dollar does not generate the same excitement, even when it is quietly absorbing the utility that once justified XRP’s existence.
The listing trajectory tells its own story. Binance added RLUSD in January 2026. OKX followed on April 29. Gate.io on June 15. All four Korean Big 4 exchanges, Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit, now carry it. That is not a niche product limited to Ripple’s partner network. That is distribution at scale, across every major trading region, in under a year.
More revealing is where the supply lives. At the start of 2026, only 18.4% of RLUSD existed on the XRP Ledger, with the rest on Ethereum. Today that figure has flipped to 58.9%, with $963 million on XRPL and $1.1 billion on Ethereum. The stablecoin is migrating to XRP’s home chain at an accelerating pace, which means the ledger’s growing transaction volume is increasingly denominated in dollars, not in XRP. Every mint on the XRPL is a vote of confidence in the chain and a vote of indifference toward the token.
The institutional playbook that skipped XRP
When JPMorgan ran its treasury settlement using Ripple infrastructure, it chose RLUSD for the cash leg. Not XRP. That single decision captures the entire institutional logic in one sentence.
The pattern repeated across every major deal Ripple closed in 2026. Convera, the payment company processing $190 billion per year in cross-border volume, integrated RLUSD for its corridor settlements. LMAX Digital signed a $150 million deal to bring RLUSD into its institutional trading infrastructure. Mastercard connected through Ripple’s payment APIs. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund interacted with the Ripple ecosystem through RLUSD rails. Flutterwave, fresh off a $3.2 billion Series E, partnered for African payment corridors where dollar-denominated settlement reduces friction for remittance senders. Interactive Brokers and B2C2 added RLUSD support for their institutional client bases.
Count the names. JPMorgan. Mastercard. BlackRock. Convera. These are not speculative crypto plays. These are the largest financial institutions on earth, and every single one chose the stablecoin over the token. The reasoning is not complicated. A bank treasury desk managing overnight positions in multiple currencies does not want to hold an asset that dropped 27% in eight months. A dollar-pegged token eliminates the volatility risk entirely. The parade of institutional names signing with Ripple is real, but the parade is marching toward RLUSD, and XRP is watching from the sidewalk.
This is not a conspiracy or a failure of strategy. It is the predictable result of building a stablecoin that does the same job as XRP but without the price risk. Ripple created a better product for the exact customer it spent a decade courting. The irony is thick enough to cut.
Consider the pitch Ripple made to banks from 2015 to 2023: use XRP as a bridge asset, settle in three seconds, save 40% to 70% on corridor costs compared to SWIFT. Banks listened politely and mostly declined. The volatility objection was consistent across every boardroom. Now Ripple walks into the same boardrooms with RLUSD, which offers the same three-second settlement on the same ledger with the same cost savings, minus the volatility. Banks are signing. The product-market fit that eluded XRP for a decade arrived the moment Ripple removed the token from the equation.
Fewer, larger hands
Here is the number that nobody is talking about. Active accounts on the XRP Ledger dropped 40% year over year. At the same time, daily transactions rose 21% to 2.4 million, and DEX volume surged 79%.
Read those three data points together. Fewer wallets. More transactions. Much higher volume per wallet. The network is concentrating into a smaller number of participants who each move significantly more money.
This is the “fewer, larger hands” paradox, and it reframes the entire XRP story. Retail traders, the ones who drove the 2017 rally and the 2021 echo, are leaving. The 40% drop in active accounts is not a rounding error or a seasonal blip. It is a structural shift that has persisted across multiple months. The people who bought XRP hoping it would hit $10 are gone, or at least dormant, their wallets sitting idle while the network they once championed rewires itself around institutional flows.
Who replaced them? Institutional players routing payments through RLUSD on high-throughput corridors. Market makers filling order books with larger individual trades that generate the same volume from a fraction of the accounts. Treasury operations that do not need thousands of wallets because they consolidate flows into a handful of accounts with API-driven execution and batch settlement. The ledger did not get quieter. It got more efficient, which is the polite way of saying it got more institutional and less retail.
This matters because XRP’s price has always been a retail phenomenon. Institutions did not buy XRP to hold. They used it as a bridge asset, in and out in seconds, which created transaction volume but not sustained buy pressure. The token’s market cap was built on the belief that retail holders and institutional utility would eventually converge, that the network effect would grow large enough to lift the price floor permanently.
Instead, institutions found a way to use the network without the token, and retail left when the price stopped cooperating. The convergence thesis collapsed not because it was theoretically wrong, but because RLUSD offered institutions a better path that did not require XRP exposure at all. The bridge asset became optional the moment the bridge itself could carry dollars natively.
No competitor has published this analysis. The bullish XRP content focuses on ETF inflows and partnership announcements. The bearish content points to price decline and escrow dilution. Neither side has connected the account data to the RLUSD migration to explain what is actually happening on the ledger at a structural level.
The ETF paradox
Against all of this, spot XRP ETFs are having a quietly strong year. Seven funds launched after SEC approval in March 2026, and they have pulled in $1.68 billion in cumulative inflows. August was the best month yet, with $153 million to $159 million in net new capital.
That is real money entering real custody wallets, managed by real fund managers with real fiduciary obligations. It validates XRP as an investable asset class in the eyes of traditional finance. It is also a fraction of what Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs attracted in their first six months, which suggests the institutional appetite for XRP exposure has a ceiling that the community has not fully acknowledged. More critically, it creates its own paradox. ETF buyers are accumulating XRP in a wrapper that removes it from active circulation. They are not sending XRP across borders. They are not providing liquidity on the DEX. They are not participating in the network’s growing transaction volume. They are buying exposure to a price chart that has moved against them all year, warehousing tokens in cold storage vaults while the chain underneath operates on a different asset.
The ETF inflows have not translated into sustained price appreciation because the buy pressure from funds is offset by the sell pressure from escrow unlocks and the broader market’s indifference to XRP’s fundamental story. On September 1, Ripple unlocked three escrow tranches totaling 1 billion XRP: 100 million, 400 million, and 500 million tokens. The remaining escrow holds 32.6 billion XRP, with 1 billion tokens released every month. That is a monthly supply expansion that institutional ETF buyers cannot absorb at current flow rates, especially when the use case those institutions care about now runs on RLUSD.
The structural imbalance between inflows and outflows is the ETF story that the headline numbers obscure. One billion XRP at $1.39 equals roughly $1.39 billion in potential monthly sell pressure. August ETF inflows of $159 million represent 11.4% of that figure. Even assuming Ripple relocks most of each monthly unlock, the escrow mechanism creates a persistent overhang that works against price appreciation.
The ETFs prove that financial products can exist around XRP. They do not prove that XRP needs to appreciate for the Ripple ecosystem to succeed. That distinction is the quiet earthquake at the center of this story.
Regulatory clarity arrived and the price did not care
The SEC case is resolved. Japan’s FSA approved RLUSD on June 25. The EU granted MiCA preliminary authorization in Luxembourg on June 23. The BIS published a working paper using the XRP Ledger for cryptographic proof of integrity.
Two years ago, any one of these headlines would have sent XRP up 30% in a day. All four happened in 2026, and XRP is down 27% on the year.
The obvious explanation is that regulatory clarity was already priced in. Markets anticipated the SEC resolution for over a year. The less obvious explanation is more important: regulatory clarity benefited RLUSD more than XRP. A stablecoin needs regulatory approval to function as a payment instrument in a given jurisdiction. A speculative token needs regulatory approval to avoid being delisted. The same event has different implications for different assets, and the market figured that out faster than the community did.
Japan’s FSA approval opened RLUSD to the third-largest economy by GDP, a market where dollar-denominated stablecoin settlement can replace costly yen conversion in cross-border flows. MiCA authorization covers the entire European Economic Area, granting RLUSD legal standing as an electronic money token across 30 countries. These are not theoretical markets. They are jurisdictions where RLUSD can now legally serve as a settlement currency for banks and payment processors.
XRP already traded in these markets before any of these approvals landed. Japanese retail investors have been among the largest XRP holders since 2017. European exchanges listed XRP years ago. The approvals changed nothing about XRP’s accessibility but changed everything about RLUSD’s commercial viability as a regulated payment instrument. Every regulatory win expanded the addressable market for the stablecoin while doing little more than confirming the status quo for the token. The community celebrated each headline as an XRP catalyst. The market priced each one as an RLUSD catalyst. The price chart settled the argument.
The cannibalization thesis
Put it plainly. RLUSD is cannibalizing XRP’s primary use case, and Ripple is the one doing it.
This is not accidental. Ripple spent years arguing that XRP’s volatility was a feature, that a three-second settlement window meant the price swing during transit was negligible. That argument worked when the competition was SWIFT, which took days and charged 3% to 7% in corridor fees. It does not work when the competition is RLUSD, which settles on the same ledger in the same three seconds with zero price risk and lower integration complexity.
A payment processor choosing between a bridge asset that lost 27% this year and a stablecoin pegged to one dollar will choose the stablecoin every time. Not because XRP is broken, but because the stablecoin removes a category of risk that no amount of speed can compensate for. The conditions for XRP recovery exist, but they require something beyond Ripple’s core payment business to drive demand.
The bull case for XRP now rests on three pillars that have nothing to do with cross-border payments. First, speculative demand driven by ETF flows and retail re-entry during the next broad market rally. Second, DEX activity on the XRP Ledger creating organic demand for XRP as a base trading pair, a function that grows with on-chain DeFi development. Third, burn mechanics and escrow reductions gradually tightening supply over a multi-year horizon, eventually making the monthly unlocks negligible relative to circulating supply.
None of those pillars requires RLUSD to fail. They coexist. But they also mean that XRP’s investment thesis has quietly shifted from “utility token for global payments” to “speculative asset on a chain that settles stablecoin payments.” That is a meaningful downgrade in narrative, even if the price eventually recovers. It is the difference between owning a toll bridge and owning a house near a toll bridge. The traffic still passes by. The economics are entirely different.
What Ripple gains and what XRP holders lose
Ripple the company is having an exceptional year by every metric that matters to a private enterprise. RLUSD generates revenue through minting and redemption fees. Institutional partnerships create recurring payment volume that compounds over time. Regulatory approvals open new markets with each jurisdiction. The Ripple ecosystem, measured by transaction throughput, partner count, and stablecoin adoption, has never been stronger.
XRP holders do not automatically benefit from any of that. Ripple holds billions of XRP in escrow, and the company’s success does not create a direct mechanism for that XRP to appreciate. There is no revenue share. There is no buyback program. There is no on-chain fee distribution. The link between Ripple’s business performance and XRP’s market price was always assumed by the community and never formally codified. In 2026, the data suggests that link is weaker than the community believed.
This is the uncomfortable truth that the “fewer, larger hands” data illuminates. The XRP Ledger is becoming an institutional payment rail denominated in RLUSD. The token that gave the ledger its name is becoming less relevant to the ledger’s primary function with each integration that chooses the stablecoin over the token. The network can thrive while the token stagnates, and 2026 is the first year where both of those things are happening simultaneously and measurably.
That does not mean XRP goes to zero. Plenty of tokens trade on narratives decoupled from their network’s primary utility, and some of them do very well over multi-year cycles. But it means the token needs a catalyst that is independent of Ripple’s payment business. Smart contract functionality expanding on the ledger could attract DeFi protocols that require XRP for gas fees and collateral. A DeFi ecosystem built on XRPL could generate organic trading demand that puts sustained buy pressure on the token through AMM pools and lending markets. Or a supply shock driven by sustained ETF accumulation combined with escrow reduction could tighten the float enough to move the price even without a fundamental use case shift.
Something has to create demand for XRP specifically, not for the XRP Ledger generally. Until that distinction narrows, the great disconnect will persist. And every month that RLUSD grows while XRP stagnates makes the distinction harder to close, because it proves to the next institutional prospect that the ledger works perfectly well without the token.
What to watch
- RLUSD monthly mint rate versus XRP escrow unlocks. If new RLUSD issuance consistently outpaces the dollar value of monthly escrow releases, the stablecoin is growing faster than the token supply. That ratio tells you which asset the market is choosing in real time.
- Active account trend reversal. The 40% drop in active accounts is the clearest signal of retail departure. A sustained increase over two consecutive months would indicate fresh participants entering the network, not just existing institutions adding wallets.
- XRP ETF flow acceleration. August’s $153 million to $159 million was strong but not sufficient to offset escrow sell pressure at current prices. Monthly inflows above $250 million would begin to matter for price.
- DEX volume composition. The 79% surge in DEX volume is bullish for network activity, but tracking how much of that volume is XRP-denominated versus RLUSD-denominated will reveal whether the token or the stablecoin is driving on-chain trading growth.
- Institutional settlement currency disclosure. When the next major bank or payment processor announces a Ripple integration, watch whether the press release names RLUSD, XRP, or both. That language is the clearest forward indicator of which asset institutions are choosing to build on.
What is the current price of XRP?
XRP trades near $1.39 as of early September 2026, down approximately 27% from its January high near $1.90. The token hit a year-to-date low of $1.06 in July before rallying to $1.55 in August, then pulling back again.
What is RLUSD and how big has it gotten?
RLUSD is Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in late 2025. It has grown to a $2.32 billion market cap with cumulative trading volume exceeding $9 billion, representing 1,278% growth year to date. It is listed on Binance, OKX, Gate.io, and all four major Korean exchanges.
Why is XRP falling while the network grows?
The XRP Ledger’s growing activity is increasingly driven by RLUSD settlement and institutional payment flows that use the stablecoin instead of XRP as the value transfer layer. Network utility and token price have decoupled because the utility does not require the token.
How many spot XRP ETFs exist?
Seven spot XRP ETFs launched following SEC approval in March 2026. They have attracted $1.68 billion in cumulative inflows, with August generating $153 million to $159 million, the strongest single month since launch.
Is RLUSD replacing XRP for payments?
Institutional integrations in 2026, including JPMorgan, Convera, Mastercard, and Interactive Brokers, have adopted RLUSD for settlement. Banks and payment processors prefer a dollar-pegged asset over a token carrying a 27% annual drawdown for the same three-second settlement speed.
How much XRP remains in escrow?
Ripple holds 32.6 billion XRP in escrow with monthly unlocks of 1 billion tokens. On September 1, three tranches of 100 million, 400 million, and 500 million XRP were released. The escrow creates persistent monthly sell pressure.
Why did regulatory wins not boost XRP price?
The SEC resolution, Japan FSA approval of RLUSD, and EU MiCA authorization were largely priced into XRP before they occurred. More significantly, these events disproportionately benefited RLUSD by opening new jurisdictions for regulated stablecoin use while changing little for XRP’s existing market access.
Should I buy XRP based on this analysis?
This article examines the structural relationship between XRP price action and RLUSD adoption. Individual investment decisions depend on personal risk tolerance, time horizon, and financial situation. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrency markets carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions. Published September 9, 2026.
Goldman Sachs’ Anshul Sehgal says bonds yielding 5% or more are not the best trade right now. He still favors AI infrastructure, which he sees as a far more asymmetric bet than the long bond.
Sehgal, a global co-head of Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities (FICC) at the bank, laid out the view just a few days after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
Why Goldman Sachs Is Passing on 5%+ Bonds
On Goldman’s The Markets, Sehgal said the 30-year Treasury, known as the long bond, had hovered around 5% for weeks. He noted that clients want to buy it at 5% or higher, yet he still sees little upside.
The yield has kept climbing since the recording, reaching 5.56% on September 29, a new 52-week high. Sehgal blamed structural pressure for the strain on the long end. Retiring baby boomers are buying fewer long bonds, and heavy long-dated borrowing tied to AI is crowding the market.
Those pressures explain why the selloff can persist even without a fresh inflation shock. Fewer retirees buying long bonds and a steady flow of long-dated borrowing tied to AI both weigh on prices, and neither fades quickly.
Sehgal adds that fear over US debt sustainability makes investors less willing to hold the long end, which feeds on itself.
The takeaway is that a rising yield does not necessarily break his thesis. It may instead show why he sees limited reward in owning the bond, while the risk to his AI trade is that costlier long-term borrowing squeezes the levered companies he favors.
AI Compute Is the Asymmetric Trade
An asymmetric trade offers far more potential gain than risk. Sehgal applies that label to compute (AI computing power), data centers, and Neoclouds, which are cloud providers built to rent out that capacity.
“I think the asymmetric expression is being long compute.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
The catch is leverage. Savers collecting higher interest have effectively financed the AI build-out, leaving equities more indebted than a year ago. Sehgal admits these are levered bets. Still, he thinks they can multiply in value, while the wider stock market looks less certain.
Tighter Policy Hits Spenders, Not Capital
Sehgal says the Fed frames its September 16 hike as catch-up after five years above its inflation target. Schwab counts 16 of 19 Fed officials expecting another increase this year. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh also stressed three times that the Fed is easing back some stimulus rather than turning restrictive, Sehgal adds.
He argues that government interest payments flow to capital rather than workers, so higher rates curb household spending, a risk for the broader stock market.
He also rejects the debt-sustainability fears weighing on long bonds.
“For me, that’s a red herring.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
Meanwhile, BlackRock’s Rick Rieder is cutting equities for bonds paying 7% to 8%, though his high-grade bond call still cautions against rushing into the 10-year Treasury.
Sehgal names the Middle East conflict as the top driver of policy and markets in the weeks ahead.
The post Goldman Sachs Explains Why Not to Buy the 5%+ Bonds and Rather Stick to AI appeared first on BeInCrypto.
“Bitcoin has pulled back to $83K, testing the lower boundary of last week’s consolidation range,” Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email to CoinDesk. “As with the market as a whole, a retest of the $82K region, where peaks were formed in May and early September, is entirely to be expected under current conditions.”
“Looking ahead, a sustained return to prices below $80K would be an important signal that the market is not ready to move higher for some time yet. If, however, this consolidation is soon followed by a new bullish momentum, it could send the leading cryptocurrency well above $90K,” he added.
The pressure is coming from bonds and oil.
Treasuries steadied in Asia after tumbling during U.S. trading, with the 10-year yield up one basis point to 5.25% after reaching its highest level since 2007 on Monday. A higher guaranteed return on government debt raises the bar for holding assets that pay no income, bitcoin among them.
Brent rose more than 1% to nearly $107 a barrel, its second straight gain, as hopes for an imminent diplomatic breakthrough with Iran faded.
Pricier oil feeds into inflation, and traders have been adding to bets that the Fed will raise rates again. MSCI’s All Country World Index fell to its lowest since Sept. 18, and Nasdaq 100 futures slipped 0.3% after Monday’s tech-led selloff on Wall Street.
U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether is a go-to tool for the Iranian government to bypass sanctions, a new report from a group of Senate Democrats said.
Democrats on the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence published a report Monday laying out the argument that Tether plays a key role in allowing Iran to conduct transactions that skirt international sanctions.
“Iran’s cryptocurrency-based shadow banking network has processed significant volumes of funds and implicates various Iranian interests,” the report said, adding that Tether has “repeatedly failed” to block Iran-connected wallets.
“USDT has become a significant financial lifeline within Iran’s shadow banking network,” the report said.
When Tether does freeze wallets, it sometimes takes weeks, but the company also sometimes responds to requests without actually blacklisting wallets, the report claimed.
“Prior to 2024, Tether did not comprehensively and consistently freeze wallets designated by counter-terrorism agencies and continues to fail to proactively block clearly illicit wallets,” the report said. “This absence of deterrence invited abuse: terrorist organizations such as Hamas shifted from transacting in Bitcoin and a mix of cryptocurrencies to promoting USDT.”
Elon Musk’s Grok AI predicts an extremely bullish price for Ripple (XRP) by January 1, 2027, that will blow the minds of even the most dedicated members of the Ripple Army.
If you’re holding a sizeable bag of XRP USD, you may want to sit down before reading this. Grok claims that $25–$40 is achievable by 2027, with a stretch target of $50+ under the assumption of a full-blown crypto bull market returning and being supercharged by an unprecedented institutional catalyst.
XRP currently trades near $1.50–$1.52 as of September 28, 2026, down nearly -3% over the past 24 hours and with a daily trading volume of $3.5Bn, up from $3.2Bn the day prior.
This outlook is extreme and leans far beyond standard institutional forecasts. It assumes not only a strong late-2026 bull market driven by liquidity and risk-on conditions, but also a once-in-a-generation catalyst.
What is the Catalyst that Grok AI Predicts Could Spark an XRP Run Toward $40
Major central banks (including the Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan, and PBOC) announcing that the XRP Ledger will serve as a primary settlement layer for cross-border CBDC and tokenized asset flows, combined with large commercial banks being incentivized or required to hold XRP as a liquidity buffer, and revelations of massive sovereign wealth fund accumulation.
Under this highly speculative scenario, forced institutional demand collides with retail FOMO in a classic late-cycle mania, allowing XRP to move from the current ~$1.50 range through previous-cycle highs and into the mid-to-high double digits by early 2027.
This remains pure speculation and entertainment, not a base-case or even high-probability outlook. Crypto markets are extremely volatile, and the catalyst described above would require multiple extraordinary policy and institutional developments.
However, with Ripple’s case against the SEC dropped and its subsequent rise as a highly favored US-based digital asset company under President Trump, anything could be on the table for XRP if the perfect scenario aligns.
Got a Gut Feeling? It Could Pay Out 3.7X on Polymarket
Technical Analysis Supporting the Insane Grok AI XRP Price Prediction
On the higher timeframes, XRP has already established a constructive recovery base after reclaiming key moving averages from the mid-September lows near $1.25–$1.30. Price is consolidating in the $1.45–$1.55 region after testing highs near $1.63–$1.66.
In a normal bull market, a sustained break above $1.70–$2.00 would open the door to the prior cycle high near $3.65. Under the extreme institutional adoption scenario outlined above, that prior high would likely be cleared with significant force, triggering a series of measured-move and Fibonacci extension targets far beyond historical levels.
Aggressive projections from the multi-year base, combined with the kind of vertical price discovery seen in previous mania phases, could theoretically extend into the $25–$40+ zone if volume and momentum expand dramatically. RSI and momentum indicators would almost certainly reach deeply overbought levels during such a move, which is typical of parabolic advances.
Key nearer-term supports remain in the $1.40–$1.45 and $1.30 zones; holding those would keep the broader recovery structure intact while the market waits for (or prices in) any extraordinary catalysts.
Overall, while the current chart supports continued upside in a standard bull market, only an extreme surge in institutional demand and narrative intensity could justify the kind of multi-thousand-percent extension implied by the $25–$50 targets.
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Maxi Doge Targets Early Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels
While the Grok AI prediction of a potential 30x run for XRP is exciting, presale plays have a stronger track record of producing such returns. It does explain why attention keeps drifting toward presale-stage plays with smaller denominators.
Maxi Doge ($MAXI) is one of those plays. It is an Ethereum-based meme token built around a 240-lb canine mascot and a “1000x leverage” trading-culture identity. The presale has raised $4.8M at a current price of $0.0002841, with dynamic APY staking live for holders.
Standout features include holder-only trading competitions with leaderboard rewards and a Maxi Fund treasury earmarked for liquidity and partnerships.
The meme-first, gym-bro marketing angle (“never skip leg day, never skip a pump”) is endearing. The accumulation numbers suggest plenty of traders are picking a side.
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Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Grok AI Predicts XRP Could Hit $40 in 2026 With Landmark Event appeared first on Cryptonews.
When it was first proposed in December 2025, the rule was divisive, drawing ire from environmental advocates while garnering praise from auto-industry trade groups. The Administration finalized it last week with a signoff from President Donald Trump.
The President commented on the forthcoming rule Sept. 26, saying the new standards would “take the waste out of building cars in America.”
“That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The claim that the revisions will pass down cost savings to American buyers, however, relies on several factors, including automakers’ pricing decisions, fuel costs, and broader economic conditions.
What changes under Trump’s new fuel economy rule?
Former President Joe Biden’s regulations were put in place in 2024 to reduce car-based greenhouse gas emissions, decrease dependence on fossil fuels, and spur a transition to electric and hybrid vehicles. The Trump Administration has claimed that its revisions are more focused on bolstering the auto industry and making safer, newer cars more accessible.
EigenLayer held $19.7 billion at its peak and liquid restaking tokens grew more than 1,000% in the first six weeks of 2024. But the services buying security never paid enough to cover both the base staking yield and a premium on top, so the second yield restaking promised never materialized.
On Sept. 8, DefiLlama’s restaking category held $10.02 billion and generated $99,977 in fees over the prior week. The liquid staking category, on $51.87 billion, generated $27.35 million. Per dollar secured, ordinary staking earns roughly 53 times more.
Two developments then removed what was left of the incentive to restake. Points programs subsidizing deposits wound down through 2025, and slashing went live in April 2025. Slashing is the penalty that confiscates part of an operator’s staked ETH when it misbehaves, by going offline or signing conflicting messages, for example. So restaking suddenly carried a real, priced downside where before the risk had been theoretical. There was no extra yield to compensate.
Set ether.fi aside and the rest of the sector is small. Renzo, Kelp, Swell, Puffer Finance and Bedrock, the five largest remaining liquid restaking tokens, made $953,350 in combined gross profit in the second quarter of 2026. Three quarters earlier the same five made $2.18 million. Puffer, which raised $23 million, recorded $21,590 for the quarter. Swell recorded $22,370.
The income statements also show which part of these businesses was ever profitable, and it was not the restaking. On Kelp’s books, EIGEN token rewards appear at $460,600 in gross revenue and $460,600 in cost of revenue: they arrive and pass straight to depositors, leaving nothing with the protocol. Puffer and Swell book staking rewards the same way. Whatever profit these companies made came from the orinary staking fees charged underneath the restaking layer.
“There’s a convergence now that you’re seeing between traditional market participants and digital asset market participants as well,” Lynq CEO Jerald David said in an interview with CoinDesk TV.
For firms using Lynq, FTIXX gives them somewhere to put cash between trades rather than leaving it sitting around. They can earn yield on the money and pull it out when they need it again.
That was a product Lynq’s clients had been asking for, David said. The network works with firms including B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy ·, FalconX, Crypto.com and Fireblocks, whose businesses can require moving large amounts of money between trades. They wanted another option for putting that cash to work in the meantime.
“We needed to demonstrate that there was client demand,” David said. “Our clients were looking for a treasury asset on the platform that may have had a different yield profile than the other instrument that’s on there right now.”
Getting FTIXX onto the network required some work. Lynq had to modify its technology, restrict access to U.S. clients and integrate with Mosaic, he said. Customers also need a relationship with tZERO Securities and must meet the required onboarding and eligibility checks.
Lynq itself runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche (AVAX) Layer 1 blockchain. Its network has more than 30 institutional digital-asset firms onboarded and more than $89 million in assets, according to the company.
Crypto
Crypto’s Widening Net: From Fed Bets to Blackjack Tables, Digital Assets Keep Blurring Old Boundaries
If there is one throughline in this week’s crop of crypto headlines, it is that the industry has stopped pretending it is only about buying and holding coins. Across a handful of stories making the rounds, digital assets are shown pushing into territory once reserved for central bankers, casino floors, brokerage accounts and pre-IPO investors alike — a reminder that “crypto news” increasingly means finance news, gambling news and macro news rolled into one.
Take the growing chatter around prediction markets and Federal Reserve policy. Traders have been flocking to on-chain betting platforms to price the odds of late-2026 rate decisions, effectively turning monetary policy into a tradable asset class alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. That such markets exist at all is notable: a decade ago, speculating on FOMC outcomes required options contracts or futures desks.
Now it can happen peer-to-peer on a blockchain, with odds shifting in real time as economic data lands. The rise of these markets suggests crypto infrastructure is becoming a genuine alternative venue for hedging and speculating on the traditional economy, not just a parallel casino for digital tokens.
Speaking of casinos, the sector itself continues to evolve in ways that mirror shifts in consumer taste rather than technology alone. Reports on crypto gambling lobbies note that live-dealer blackjack tables are increasingly outnumbering roulette wheels—a seemingly small detail that says more about what crypto-native gamblers want.
Live blackjack offers a sense of skill and control that pure-chance games like roulette can’t match, and operators appear to be responding by stacking their lobbies accordingly. It’s a small but telling sign that crypto casinos are maturing into product-driven businesses competing on experience, not just novelty.
Meanwhile, the boundary between crypto trading and traditional equities markets keeps eroding. New developments around Aave’s lending protocol reportedly let users borrow stablecoins against tokenized versions of tech stocks issued through Coinbase and built on the Base network.
If that model gains traction, it would mark a significant step in bringing real-world assets fully into DeFi’s collateral system — letting someone hold a tokenized slice of a Nasdaq darling and borrow against it the same way they might borrow against ETH or Bitcoin today. It’s the kind of integration that regulators, banks and crypto-native builders have all been circling for years, and its practical rollout matters more than the concept alone.
On the trading-platform side, perpetual futures exchanges continue to expand what counts as a “market.” One report describes a platform offering more than 120 perpetual contracts spanning everything from Bitcoin to pre-IPO robotics companies, letting traders apply leverage to assets that, in many cases, aren’t even publicly listed yet.
This kind of expansion into speculative, illiquid corners of the private market — wrapped in crypto’s leverage-friendly perpetual format — raises real questions about price discovery and risk, even as it satisfies demand from traders hungry for exposure beyond the usual crypto majors.
Finally, there’s the steady drumbeat of token listings that keeps the broader ecosystem churning. A gambling-focused token tied to the Dexsport platform recently landed on the MEXC exchange, a move that typically brings a token more liquidity and visibility, if not necessarily more fundamental value. Listings like these remain a bread-and-butter event in crypto markets — routine, but still closely watched by holders hoping for a price bump and a wider trading audience.
Individually, none of these developments is likely to reshape the industry overnight. But together they sketch a familiar pattern in crypto’s ongoing evolution: infrastructure built for speculative tokens is steadily being repurposed for macro bets, tokenized equities, private-company exposure and gambling products alike.
The technology is proving flexible enough to wrap around almost anything with a price — which is exactly why regulators, investors and casual observers alike keep struggling to say where “crypto” ends and the rest of finance begins.
Perplexity AI predicts that if a full-blown bull market returns in Q4, Bitcoin could reach $180,000 before January 1, 2027. The bullish range is estimated at $140,000 to $180,000, with a potential late-cycle surge that could push Bitcoin beyond $200,000.
Currently priced around $83,000, this would represent a gain of about 115% to reach $180,000. What’s noteworthy is that Bitcoin has already corrected significantly from its previous cycle high of about $126,200 on October 6, 2025, followed by a sharp decline during 2026.
Bitcoin has a history of producing substantial gains during strong market cycles. According to historical annual data, BTC gained approximately 154% in 2023 and 110% in 2024. If the current predictions hold true, we may see a similar increase on the horizon.
Perplexity AI Predicts Bitcoin to $180,000 if Bullish Catalysts Align: Does the Technical Analysis Back it Up?
Bitcoin recently broke out of a pattern of lower highs that had developed since May, reclaiming several key moving averages. According to Reuters’ technical analysis, $81,781 is considered important support, while $86,500 is a significant resistance level. Above that, the next technical targets are around $90,000 and $97,867.
CryptoQuant has noted a similar trend, calling $81,700 a key level because it aligns with Bitcoin’s 365-day moving average. Resistance levels above this are near $86,600 and $88,700.
Bitcoin’s first major test is surpassing the $85,000 level, followed by the $86,000 to $88,000 range. Bitcoin has pushed through this area, which matters because a sustained breakout would remove one of the largest technical obstacles between its current price and the $100,000 level.
The next major milestone is approximately $98,000. Beyond that, the market will be approaching the all-time high of $126,200, where it gets particularly interesting.
Once Bitcoin decisively breaks beyond $126,000, it will enter a phase of genuine price discovery. Historical resistance above that level is very limited. At that point, psychological targets such as $130,000, $140,000, and $150,000 could attract momentum traders and institutional investors.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Bitcoin Drops Dangerously Close to $80,000
A -2.5% daily drop is not too much to worry about for whales and those already heavily positioned at a much lower price. However, for those who bought over $80,000, things could be getting uncomfortable, which is why presale opportunities prove so popular.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning itself as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with full SVM integration. It boasts smart contract execution built for speed that outpaces Solana itself, while settling back to Bitcoin’s base-layer security.
As of today, the presale has raised more than $33.1M at a current token price of just $0.0136864, with staking rewards live at launch at a huge 35% APY.
The pitch: solve Bitcoin’s slow transactions, high fees, and lack of programmability without abandoning what makes BTC trusted in the first place. A Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles BTC transfers natively.
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Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Perplexity AI Predicts a Big Move for BTC in 2026 Even With Recent Dip appeared first on Cryptonews.
XRP lost its $1.50 price pivot today, sliding to $1.47 after a daily decline of about 3%. The break forces a binary question onto the chart: does the selling pressure showing up in spot-market volume resolve into a quick reclaim, or does it open the door to a deeper slide toward $1.40-$1.42?
The 200-day EMA is near $1.37, the level that would flip the medium-term structure from bullish to neutral. The token has been printing lower highs since a local peak near $1.63 on September 23, and a second attempt to clear $1.60 on September 25 failed as well. Since then, the decline has been slow and orderly: $1.55, then $1.52, then $1.50, and now $1.47.
There was no single dramatic session driving the move. Instead, the pattern reads as buyers simply not showing up, with every small bounce getting sold rather than extended. After the sharp rally in early September, that kind of cooling was overdue, but the open question is whether $1.50 was ever real support or just a round number the market is now testing.
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ETF Accumulation Narrative or Technical Pullback?
The chart itself frames this as a cooling-off period following the rally that carried the XRP price up nearly 50% from its August low near $1.00. RSI sits at a neutral 54, with no overbought or oversold readings to lean on. Price levels, not oscillators, are setting the tone for this week.
Separately, market data has pointed to sustained spot XRP ETF inflows running into the hundreds of millions of dollars over recent weeks, a trend some trackers frame as ongoing institutional accumulation beneath the price action. That flow data is useful context, but it is not confirmed as the driver of Monday’s drop, as the pullback below $1.50 traces cleanly to failed resistance tests and fading bid support.
The medium-term structure remains intact for now. XRP sits above its 200-day EMA at $1.37, which is curling upward for the first time since spring. This is a sign the longer trend has not broken, even as the shorter-term chart bleeds lower. A descending trendline from the late-August spike to $1.70 was cleared in mid-September, and that breakout is what fueled the run to $1.67 in the first place.
A second descending trendline, drawn from the September 23 high, is now the line bulls need to clear in October; left alone, it points toward $1.20 by mid-November. The levels on both sides of the current price are well defined.
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Reclaim $1.50 or Risk $1.37: XRP Price Next Move
The first job for bulls is straightforward: close a daily candle back above $1.50. Do that, and Monday’s drop reads as a fakeout rather than a breakdown, with $1.55 as the next confirmation level and $1.60-$1.63 as the target that would put the September 23 high back in play.
Fail to reclaim $1.50 in the next day or two, and $1.40-$1.42 becomes the level to watch, with the 200-day EMA at $1.37 as the line that actually matters for the medium-term outlook. A close below it would shift Ripple’s native asset from a bullish structure to a neutral one, opening room toward $1.30 and, in a broader crypto market sell-off scenario, $1.20.
$XRP just printed it's 6th weekly close beneath the 50 week EMA. The bears contInue to hold their defence line, with the bulls support below at $1.31 as a guardrail. (20 week EMA. For the time being, we remain compressed. https://t.co/7j6d2KB27L pic.twitter.com/r9kwHDmf2R
—
ChartNerd
(@ChartNerdTA) September 28, 2026
For this week, the range is $1.37 to $1.60, with $1.50 sitting as the pivot in between. On technical analysis grounds, the base case is a dip toward $1.40-$1.42 that gets bought, followed by another attempt at reclaiming $1.50. A pattern consistent with pullbacks inside an uptrend rather than the start of a new downtrend.
The $1.80-$2.00 zone remains the valid medium-term target as long as $1.37 holds; lose it, and that target moves out of reach for the immediate term.
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The post XRP Price Slides 2.9% as $1.50 Reclaim Becomes Critical appeared first on Cryptonews.
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