XRP Bulls Pay the Price for Leverage as ETF Demand Stalls

XRP's latest pullback has landed hardest on traders who borrowed to bet on higher prices. Within a single day, positions worth $9.57 million were liquidated, according to data pulled today, and long positions accounted for 96.5% of the total. That is a reckoning for leveraged bulls rather than a verdict on the broader market — and it leaves the token's next move hinging on whether forced selling fades and fresh demand steps in.

Liquidation forces a position closed once the collateral behind it no longer covers the trade. That shifts attention from price alone to how traders are positioned: further declines can unleash additional pressure if heavily leveraged longs are caught out again.

Big Traders Stay Long Despite the Wreckage

Even after the liquidations, major players in one corner of the derivatives market remain firmly tilted toward gains. By this morning, long positions made up 84% of XRP contracts collateralized in cryptocurrencies — a rise of 3.64 percentage points from the previous day.

That positioning points to lingering recovery hopes in this segment, though it also sharpens the exposure to further forced closures should XRP keep sliding. The question is whether the appetite to buy translates into an actual price floor.

A different picture emerges from Santiment's reading of a narrow group of highly profitable XRP wallets. As of Friday, three active short sellers had added roughly 2.1 million XRP to their positions since late October. Just one of the tracked wallets held a long.

A Short Call With a Built-In Deadline

The Santiment data offers a cautious signal — provided the shorts have the direction right. Their activity stands in sharp contrast to the aggressive long bias in the collateralized futures segment.

One tracked trader is betting on a decline to around $0.99. His thesis is due for review on November 19, and he has named an XRP close above $1.36 as the level that would disprove it. That condition makes the call checkable for anyone watching: the bearish scenario gains weight while the price stays weak, whereas a sustained rebound would put the short positioning under strain.

What a Real Recovery Would Need

XRP trades at $1.16 and remains under pressure, down 37% since the start of the year. Given the scale of the liquidations, a durable countermove requires more than one group of traders continuing to buy.

Analyst Zach Humphries points to sustained daily closes above $1.20 and $1.30 as the prerequisite for a confirmed recovery. If the lower mark fails to hold, he sees a possible slide to $1.10.

Funds Offer No Fresh Fuel

The spot XRP ETFs listed in the US have done nothing to help the demand side. From Tuesday through Friday, the funds recorded no net capital movements at all, media reports said, leaving them without any additional demand impulse. That flat stretch followed a net outflow of $529,510 on November 2; the bleeding stopped, but the direction never turned toward net inflows.

For holders, that is at best a limited all-clear: the earlier withdrawal did not continue, yet a positive contribution only begins once inflows outpace outflows. The absence of fund demand sits alongside the weak price action and raises the stakes on the next moves in the ETFs for anyone hunting for signs of a revival.

A Patch, a Policy Push and a Supply Release

On the technical front, the XRP Ledger on Wednesday activated the amendment fixCleanup3_4_0, closing a permissions gap. Accounts cleared only to burn issued tokens could, under certain conditions, have been able to create them as well. The native XRP supply was untouched, according to reports, and no exploitation was publicly confirmed — the fix removed a concrete flaw in delegated permissions.

Supply also shifted on schedule: Ripple released 1 billion XRP from escrow on November 1 and, per media reports, re-locked 700 million of it the same day.

On policy, Ripple's chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty has argued for a rules-based approach over case-by-case enforcement — a push that points toward more predictable regulation and a potential opening for investors, provided the eventual framework follows the path Ripple favors. For now, net inflows into the US spot ETFs remain the more immediate test of any pickup in demand.