Mentioned in This Article
1. Why is XRP down while other major coins are up?
XRP, the fifth-largest digital asset by market value, changed hands near $1.33 on October 16, 2026, which is 62.5% below the record of $3.55 it set in early January 2018. Bitcoin, BNB and dogecoin sit far above their own peaks from that era, and analysts point to supply growth, thin ETF demand and a long legal fight.
The gap matters because a common assumption in crypto is that simply holding a major token for years builds wealth. That assumption has proved true for several large assets but not for all of them. A buyer who entered XRP at its 2018 top is still sitting on a substantial paper loss almost nine years later, even though the broader market has grown enormously over the same period.
XRP is the token native to the XRP Ledger and is closely associated with Ripple, the payments company. It is positioned mainly as a means of moving value across borders, a focus that shapes how investors judge it and helps explain why it has behaved differently from assets tied to other market narratives.
Understanding the gap requires separating price from value. A token's price is the market's current valuation divided by the number of units available, so two assets with identical growth in total value can show very different price histories if one has issued many more units. The sections below examine the explanations analysts offer, from supply and demand to Ripple's strategy and the legal dispute that shadowed the token for years.
2. How far is XRP from its old highs compared with its peers?
Crypto reached a broad audience in 2017, pulling in new users and investors during a rally that carried into the opening weeks of 2018. Measured against the highs of that period, the major assets have followed very different paths. XRP reached $3.55 in early January 2018 and has not regained that level on a sustained basis.
It did briefly break through. In July 2025 the token touched $3.66, topping the old record, but it then fell back sharply and has not held the gain. The brief move above the previous peak means that the 2018 high was technically surpassed, yet anyone buying at the 2018 top and waiting would still show a loss today.
The comparison with its peers is stark. Bitcoin is about 314% above its December 2017 peak of $19,804. Dogecoin is roughly 322% above its January 2018 high, and BNB is up about 2,800%. Ether is higher by 66% and Zcash by 38%, while Tron sits about 4% beneath its peak. Solana launched in 2020 and therefore has no 2017-era high against which to be measured.
These gains came even though many of the same assets have dropped substantially from the highs they reached in 2025. Bitcoin, ether and other tokens have retreated sharply from those levels but remain far above where they traded during the 2017 cycle, which underlines how unusual XRP's position is among the largest coins.
A peak-to-present comparison is a blunt tool, since it depends heavily on the date chosen. Even so, it captures a plain reality for holders: those who bought near the top of the first mainstream crypto boom and never sold have had very different outcomes depending on which asset they chose, and XRP sits at the weaker end of that spectrum among the largest tokens.
3. Has too much new supply diluted XRP?
Analysts first point to supply. Nicolai Sondergaard, a senior research analyst at the blockchain analytics firm Nansen, says XRP's circulating supply has grown by 63%, rising from 38.7 billion tokens to 63.1 billion, while the asset's total market value has slipped only about 3%. In practical terms, the same pool of value is now divided among many more tokens, so each one is worth less.
That arithmetic is central to the argument. Price is the figure most holders watch, but it depends on how many units exist. When supply expands quickly and total value stays roughly flat, the price per unit has to fall, even if the overall market assessment of the asset has barely changed.
Oliver Carding, head of marketing at Tesseract Group, an institutional digital asset manager with more than $500 million in assets under management, makes a related point. He argues that XRP looks healthier when judged by total value rather than by price. On that basis, he says, XRP has effectively recovered, and holding the same market capitalization with today's larger supply implies a price about 39% lower than it would otherwise be.
The supply argument does not by itself explain why other assets rose, but it shows that comparing a 2018 price with a 2026 price can mislead when the number of tokens in circulation has changed so much in between.
4. What does weaker demand look like for XRP?
Demand is the second explanation. Exchange-traded funds listed in the United States opened a new route for institutions to gain exposure to digital assets, and bitcoin and ether funds have attracted billions of dollars. Funds tied to XRP have drawn far less.
Paul Howard, senior director at the market maker Wincent, describes uptake of the XRP products as muted compared with the bitcoin and ether versions. According to data from SoSoValue, XRP funds have gathered about $1.80 billion since their debut nearly a year ago. Bitcoin funds, by contrast, often take in more than $1 billion in a single day.
Trading data from Nansen points the same way. XRP's spot trading volume has dropped 53.5%, volume in its perpetual futures contracts has fallen 44%, and the number of active addresses has declined 10.7%. Lower volume and fewer active participants are typical signs that fewer investors are engaging with an asset, which tends to weigh on its price.
Taken together, the fund inflows and the on-chain and trading statistics suggest that the institutional and retail interest lifting other large tokens has not arrived at the same scale for XRP.
The contrast with bitcoin is especially sharp because fund flows act as a steady source of buying. When products draw hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, the underlying asset must be purchased to back them, which supports prices. A product that gathers a fraction of that sum provides far less of this support, so the lack of comparable inflows leaves XRP without a similar tailwind.
5. Has Ripple's focus on payments held XRP back?
Ripple has concentrated on cross-border payments rather than decentralized finance, artificial intelligence or memecoins. Those other areas have attracted large amounts of capital and have achieved deeper integration with traditional finance, which has benefited the tokens most closely linked to them.
Howard says Ripple's work on payment infrastructure, its RLUSD stablecoin and trade finance has drawn attention away from the core XRP token. A company can build a successful business around a network without the native asset capturing all of that success, and investors in the token may see little direct benefit from such efforts.
He also notes that decentralized finance has become a defining investment story for ether, Solana (SOL) and Hyperliquid's HYPE token. XRP has not pursued that narrative, so it has missed a theme that has pulled money toward its rivals.
The strategic choice carries a trade-off. Payments are a large market and arguably a natural fit for the XRP Ledger, but they tend to generate steady, incremental adoption rather than the rapid speculative interest that drives price surges in newer sectors.
6. How did the SEC case affect XRP?
Legal uncertainty is the third factor. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple and two of its executives in December 2020, alleging that the company had raised about $1.3 billion through unregistered sales of XRP. A federal court ruling in 2023 found that XRP sales on public exchanges were not securities offerings, while sales to institutions were. Ripple was ordered to pay a $125 million penalty in 2024, and the case ended in August 2025 when both sides dropped their appeals.
Carding says the dispute helps explain why XRP failed to regain its 2018 high during the 2021 bull market, a period in which Coinbase suspended trading in the token. A years-long cloud over its legal status kept some exchanges and investors away at a time when other assets were rallying.
The resolution did not produce the rebound some holders might have expected. Carding notes that XRP is down about 59% since the appeals were dropped, compared with about 32% for bitcoin and 44% for ether. Its circulating market capitalization has fallen about 56% over the same stretch.
7. Is XRP the only 2018 leader that has fallen behind?
XRP is not alone. Carding observes that six of the other nine assets in the top ten of January 2018 remain below the levels they held that week. Leading the market at one cycle's peak has never guaranteed lasting gains, and many assets that were prominent then have since lost ground or faded.
That context tempers a simple reading of the XRP story as a unique failure, but it does not change the numbers for those who bought near the top and have held ever since.
Carding suggests several indicators for anyone watching whether the picture is shifting. They include XRP's performance against bitcoin, the net monthly distribution of tokens after Ripple's scheduled escrow releases, and changes in the holdings of XRP funds.
8. What would signal that demand is still weakening?
The simplest test is relative strength. If XRP keeps lagging bitcoin even as fewer new tokens enter the market, that would indicate investor demand is deteriorating rather than merely being diluted by supply. Slower supply growth would remove one explanation for the weakness, leaving demand as the main driver.
For now the data show a token well below its old peak, a market that has largely moved on without it, and several analysts who see supply, demand and history all contributing to the gap. Whether the pattern changes will depend on how fund holdings, trading volumes and token distribution evolve in the coming months.