XRP BREAKS $1 as Cracks Begins To Show Make or Break Zone

XRP is trading at a make-or-break zone around the one dollar level on the weekly chart. A break below one dollar could trigger internal conflict among XRP ledger builders and node operators, with the 96 to 97 cent range identified as a possible exit point for holders watching that threshold.

On-chain fundamentals for XRP are deteriorating across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The number of XRP payments between accounts and total payment volume have both declined over the past year. DEX volume and total value locked on the XRP ledger are also falling. RLUSD DEX trading volume on the XRP ledger stands at approximately 1.5 million with only 233 traders, which is a thin market by any measure and raises questions about real adoption depth.

RLUSD's stablecoin market cap grew from approximately 1.4 billion to 1.7 billion in August, while Ripple's standard monthly escrow release resulted in a net new supply of 300 million XRP tokens after locking 700 million back. The concern raised is that this net release may be flowing into RLUSD rather than supporting XRP demand directly, meaning Ripple's own stablecoin growth could be cannibalizing the token it is meant to complement. Ripple also chose to sunset its quarterly XRP markets report starting Q2 2025, reducing transparency at precisely the moment Standard Chartered flagged opacity as a key concern in its coverage.

Standard Chartered cut its 2026 XRP price target by 65 percent, from 8 dollars down to 2.80 dollars, citing a lack of clarity on how value accrues to XRP token holders. XRP ETF assets stand at 1.4 billion compared to 1.8 billion for Solana ETFs, and XRP only entered the Bitwise 10 large cap crypto index in 2023, giving it a shorter continuous track record than Solana. That shorter track record raises the possibility XRP could be bumped from the index if performance or methodology criteria shift, which would remove a passive demand source.

The XRP ledger has faced a series of technical problems that compound the fundamental concerns. A 64-minute outage occurred in February 2025, multiple issues followed the latest version launch in June 2025, and a node upgrade was pushed on August 2nd. An XRP bridge was also drained for 200,000 dollars after software incorrectly treated fake deposits as real ones. XRP currently has only two bridges, Flare and Axelar, and the cross-chain liquidity situation is severe enough that attempting to move 10,000 dollars in RLUSD via the Axelar bridge to Solana would result in retaining only about 3,000 dollars in SOL, representing a loss of approximately 69 percent in the transaction alone.

On the positive side, Geon Bank is cited as one of the first regional banks in Korea to deploy Ripple payments for cross-border remittances, representing a concrete institutional use case. Ripple contributed significant funds toward crypto regulatory clarity efforts and Brad Garlinghouse was expected to meet with Trump alongside other crypto leaders. However, if the relevant legislation does not pass, that spending would effectively be wasted, making the regulatory bet a conditional positive rather than a confirmed tailwind. The combination of declining on-chain activity, reduced transparency, a sharply lowered price target from a major bank, bridge infrastructure losses, and repeated technical outages creates a picture where the one dollar level carries more weight than a simple round number, functioning instead as a credibility threshold for the network and its ecosystem participants.