XRP's 365-Day MVRV Slips to 0.92, Leaving Year-Long Buyers Underwater

Year-long buyers sit underwater

On-chain readings point to a possible floor forming under XRP, though a swollen exchange reserve still stands between the token and any durable rebound. The XRP price has drifted lower through October, and one of the clearest markers of where holders stand has now turned negative: the 365-day market-value-to-realized-value (MVRV) ratio, a metric that compares what investors paid for their coins over the past year with what the market prices them at today, has slipped to roughly 0.92, according to a compilation by the on-chain analytics firm Santiment published on Tuesday. A reading below 1.00 means the average buyer of the past twelve months is under water. At 0.92, that cohort carries an unrealized loss of about 8%, which in practice leaves fewer holders sitting on profit they could sell into a recovery. When the ratio sits above parity, profitable holders can realize gains into strength; below it, that overhang thins out, which is why analysts treat the gauge as a read on selling pressure rather than a timing signal. The figure also sits low against the wider market: Santiment's October 20 snapshot put the altcoin leader Dogecoin near 0.74, while Bitcoin, Ethereum and Chainlink clustered between 0.97 and 1.04. The derivatives side shows the same cooling. Open-interest data tracked by CryptoQuant places Binance's XRP crypto futures book at $538.1 million on October 4, falling to $453.0 million by October 17, a decline of 15.8% during a stretch in which the price slid from $1.52 to $1.29. Binance's estimated leverage ratio eased from 0.205 to 0.170 in step, and the October 7-8 session alone flushed roughly $25.7 million in long positions through liquidation. Deleveraging of this kind removes fuel that accelerates sell-offs, but it supplies none of the demand a recovery needs.

The $15.7 billion exchange overhang

The cooldown is not market-wide, which matters for how much weight the Binance numbers carry. Glassnode figures dated October 19 put total XRP futures open interest across all venues above $1.4 billion, with Binance holding only about 27% of it, $385.4 million, while the remaining 73% sits on other exchanges. The unwind captured in the CryptoQuant series is therefore a partial read of leveraged contract trading, not the entire market. The supply side adds the heavier counterweight. Exchange wallets held 11.81 billion XRP as of October 17, a stock CryptoQuant places at the 99th percentile of the past year's distribution. Valued at $1.33 per token, a level Evernorth's Nasdaq listing also failed to lift, those balances are worth roughly $15.7 billion. Selling just 1% of the pile, 118.1 million tokens, would put about $157 million of supply on the market, equal to some 34% of the $464 million CoinGlass tracked across 24-hour spot volumes. Not every token on an exchange is waiting to be sold: wallets also hold assets for custody, market-making, hedging and collateral, so the raw figure overstates truly sellable inventory. Analysts at CryptoSlate frame the path in two branches, and their support and resistance levels extend the earlier debate in which bulls and bears split over $1.38: as long as $1.25 holds and $1.35 and $1.40 are cleared in sequence, $1.55 becomes the next objective, provided open interest does not balloon and spot buying leads the move. A decisive close below $1.25 opens the next lower band at $1.10-$1.15. Two outside variables frame the setup: the Federal Reserve's rate decision on Wednesday, October 28, and whether Bitcoin defends the $80,000-$81,500 zone.

Our reading of the two datasets is that they disagree about nothing, and the trade hinges on a single assumption. A deleveraged futures book and an underwater year-long cohort describe a market that has already paid for its leverage; neither supplies buying. The exchange stock of 11.81 billion tokens is the swing factor, and only part of it is truly floating, since custody, market-making and collateral arrangements lock much of it away. Watch whether spot demand can absorb sales without open interest rebuilding, because that, not the MVRV print itself, decides whether $1.25 becomes a floor or a waypoint toward $1.10.