XRP Holds Near $1.37 After Record $610 Million Long Liquidation Flush

The $610 Million Long Flush

Three days after the largest forced-selling episode in its history, XRP has stopped falling, but it has not found a second wind. The XRP price stood at $1.3732 in our live reading on Wednesday, up 0.6% over the past 24 hours and drifting sideways, a muted aftermath for a market that lost more than $610 million of leveraged long positions in a single session. The record flush struck on Sunday, Oct. 11, when margin calls swept through Binance, OKX and Bybit, three venues that rank among the best crypto exchanges for derivatives volume. Long positions that could no longer meet their margin requirements were closed automatically, and the mechanism fed on itself: each wave of forced selling pushed the price lower, tripped the next tier of stop-outs and turned an ordinary pullback into a cascade. A liquidation is not a trader's choice; it is a venue closing an undercollateralized position once its margin buffer is gone, which converts paper losses into realized ones instantly. By the time the selling exhausted itself, the day's total had set the largest single-day liquidation record for the asset, and it dwarfs the $17.97 million single-day squeeze recorded in an earlier flush. The positions that died on Sunday were the residue of a leverage cycle that began in September, when the recovery from August's lows pulled traders back into leveraged contract trading in size. Open interest, the total value of unsettled futures contracts, was the fuel: rising price and rising open interest meant new borrowed money, not spot buying, was carrying the rally. Traders who rode the September recovery into the $1.55-$1.60 band had been betting on a revisit of the $1.60 high; the flush removed most of them from that trade within hours. Since then, the spot market has refused to break lower, yet no bounce has gained traction either.

Positioning data we track shows what kind of market the flush left behind. Spot at $1.3732 sits between the two strongest entries on our support and resistance levels composite: $1.3370 support, scored 100 out of 100, and $1.4160 resistance, rated 95. Perpetual funding has turned fractionally negative at -0.0015%, a sign the long-side crowding that fed the cascade has cooled. The long/short account ratio stands at 3.34, with 77.0% of accounts still long, and that figure describes how accounts are positioned, not how the liquidations were split. The daily MACD signal remains bearish while the trend reads sideways, and the Fear and Greed Index at 62/100 sits in greed territory. The immediate task for buyers is a decisive daily close beyond $1.4160; until then, the range holds.

How Open Interest Rebuilt to $620 Million

The cycle that produced the flush began in August. A slide toward $1.00 in mid-August crushed open interest to roughly $360 million, its lowest level on the chart, as traders cut risk alongside the price. Open interest falling with price means contracts were being closed rather than opened, and with leverage drained, the danger of forced selling faded even as trading activity thinned. The recovery that started in September reversed that arithmetic. As the price climbed into the $1.55-$1.60 band in early October, open interest expanded to about $620 million, evidence that the rally was carried by newly opened futures contracts rather than spot demand alone. Binance's 30-day average XRP open interest reached $511 million over that stretch, an eight-month high, and the steady flow of new contracts propped up the uptrend while quietly rebuilding the same liquidation risk that eventually detonated. The aftermath has been a measured rebuild rather than a full retreat. Binance's XRP open interest stood at $467 million after the event, below the recent peak, yet it rose 2.48% over the following 24 hours as traders began opening fresh positions. Leverage cycles of this kind recur across the altcoin market, but XRP's October edition was unusually severe. Spot demand has offered a counterweight: XRP exchange-traded funds took in $11.31 million of net inflows in the week ended Friday, Oct. 9, even as ETF investors sit on roughly $230 million in unrealized losses after a 12-week inflow streak. The rebuild still outpaces the underlying demand. If fresh longs stack up while the price stalls, another dip could set off a second cascade in which forced selling cancels out new buying and pins the token in a narrow range. A return to $1.60 depends less on the futures crowd than on whether spot buyers arrive in enough size to carry the move themselves.