XRP traders bet on a rebound as price slips to $1 and bearish chatter surges

$XRP traders are increasingly betting on a rebound even as the token struggles around $1 and online commentary turns its most bearish in three months.

Futures open interest, the money tied up in outstanding derivatives positions, rose to about $2.78 billion on Monday, up 2% over 24 hours, with trading volume jumping 55% to roughly $1.17 billion, according to CoinGlass.

More than three accounts on Binance held long $XRP positions for every one holding a short, and the ratio among the exchange's largest traders was about 3.6 to one. OKX showed the same 3.6-to-one split.

A long position is a bet the price will rise. Leverage lets a trader make a bigger bet than their money would otherwise buy, at the cost of being forced out automatically if the market moves far enough against them.

Sentiment has gone the other way, meanwhile. Commentary about $XRP across X, Reddit, Telegram and other channels turned its most negative in three months this week, onchain analysis firm Santiment said, after the token failed to rally. $XRP trades around $1, down from above $3 at last year's highs.

The scale of the positioning is easier to see measured in tokens. About 2.77 billion $XRP now sits in futures positions, up from closer to 2 billion earlier this summer and nearing the levels last seen when the token was worth several times more.

The ledger is getting busier too. Nearly 50,000 addresses were active over one 24-hour stretch, the most in more than two months, per Santiment, after activity slid close to its 2026 lows in July.

An active address is a wallet that sent or received anything during the period. It shows more wallets are using the ledger, but not whether the people behind them are buying, selling or shuffling tokens between their own accounts.

CoinGlass data shows the long-to-short ratio across all venues at about 0.93 over 24 hours, meaning positioning market-wide is close to balanced. The heavy long bias sits on Binance, OKX and among their bigger accounts.

Watch what happens if $XRP breaks below $1, as leveraged longs that run out of collateral get closed by the exchange, which could mean selling into the market.

$XRP trades around $1 in Asia morning hours Monday, with bitcoin topping $64,000.