XRP rebounded sharply on Friday, rising about 18% in 24 hours to trade near $1.49, after a sharp sell-off the previous day made it the worst performer among the major coins.
The move came as Bitcoin briefly surged over $70,000 in early U.S. trading, reversing steep losses ahead of the weekend on Thursday.
The rally comes after XRP plummeted to around $1.14 in the previous session, triggering massive liquidations and weeding out traders who had been overly reliant on leverage.
Data showed short liquidations in the past 24 hours were about $26 million, compared with about $30 million in long liquidations earlier Thursday.
This imbalance is important. This suggests that the market does not react to new bad news by mechanically clearing bullish bets as prices fall. Once these positions were forced out, the selling pressure eased and XRP was able to rebound quickly.
This recovery also comes at an awkward time for XRP’s broader narrative. Ripple and its ecosystem have spent the past week building a more institutionalized future for XRP Ledger, including plans for a permissioned marketplace, lending and privacy tools.
Flare is a high-profile project trying to bring DeFi-style utility to XRP through FXRP, which is also expanding institutional access through custodian company Hex Trust.
But none of this helped XRP sentiment when the market crashed.
As a result, Friday’s rally looks less like investors suddenly buying into “institutional DeFi” and more like a classic cryptocurrency snapback: a sharp drop, leverage disappears, and then a quick rebound after forced sellers disappear.
Meanwhile, the ratio of calls to puts in futures tracking XRP shows retail longs being purged, but large traders leaning in the opposite direction.
On Binance, the overall account-based long/short ratio was 2.13 as of Friday, meaning the number of long accounts is roughly 2x the number of short accounts. This is usually a sign of crowding in bullish positions – with many smaller traders anticipating a rally.
But at the same time, the top trader Long/Short (position) on Binance is around 0.73, which means the top trader on Binance is net short.
This split suggests that the XRP sell-off is not random: it may have hit a market where smaller traders are stubbornly long while larger traders are ready to profit from the flush.
Once those longs were cleared, XRP did what it usually does after a crash: it rallied hard because there was not much selling left.