XRP Trades 66% Below Record High Despite Ripple's US Bank Approval

The Gap Between Approvals and Price

XRP's tape tells a story of accumulation that has not reached the token itself: the XRP price holds near $1.25 on Tuesday, within a fraction of a percent of Monday's close, yet it sits roughly 65.8% below the $3.65 record high set in July of last year and has lost about 16% over the past month. Reclaiming that former peak from the current level would take a rally of roughly 192%. The discount has persisted through a run of institutional milestones that would ordinarily read as bullish. On October 26, Ripple announced that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had granted final approval for the creation of Ripple National Trust Bank, roughly ten months after the conditional approval issued in December of last year. The charter places the company under federal supervision and clears it to manage the reserves of RLUSD, its dollar-pegged stablecoin, and to provide digital asset custody for institutional clients; unlike a full commercial bank, it may not accept deposits or make loans. Chief executive Brad Garlinghouse described the license as the foundation for expanding the firm's institutional financial business, saying digital assets and banks work better together. Ripple reports RLUSD has grown to a $2.5 billion market capitalization, although issuance remains with its New York-regulated subsidiary. The catch the market keeps pricing is structural: none of this expansion creates direct buying demand for XRP, so each approval lands as corporate progress rather than as token demand. Over the past 24 hours the token turned over about $943 million in trading volume while the institutional record around XRP kept growing.

COINOTAG's own level scoring, which grades each support and resistance from the indicators that converge there, frames the market in the same terms. The heaviest resistance sits directly overhead at $1.2633, a full 100/100 where the 200-day moving average, first resistance and the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement all meet, so the price is pressing into a fully loaded ceiling rather than clearing air. Below, support is layered at $1.2006, scored 69/100, after last week's intraday test of that area. Momentum agrees with the discount: RSI at 36.82, a bearish MACD signal and a standing downtrend label. Positioning shows no leverage stress either, with perp funding at 0.0052% and about $911.8 million of open interest across the crypto futures market, a backdrop in which the shortfall reflects demand, not a crowded short. The full set of levels is tracked in our XRP technical analysis.

Seven Months of ETF Inflows

Flows point the same direction as the approvals and still fail to move the price. United States spot XRP ETFs took in a net $18.83 million during October, the seventh straight green month for the funds, lifting cumulative net inflows since launch to $1.81 billion; that cumulative figure counts money deposited, not current net asset value, which shrinks as the price falls. Over the same month, Bitcoin spot ETFs shed more than $500 million and Ethereum spot ETFs more than $1.6 billion, so XRP held the steadiest demand among major assets even though October marked the second-smallest monthly inflow on record, evidence of durability rather than of buying pressure strong enough to lift the tape. Price action says the same thing: after a sharp drop on October 29, the token was pushed into the early $1.20s intraday on October 30 before rebounding, and Monday's close settled near $1.25, inside the $1.25 support zone flagged after that dip to $1.20. Entry timing now separates holders sharply: a buyer at the $3.65 peak sits about 66% underwater, while a buyer at $0.61 in November 2023 still holds roughly a 105% gain at the same price. Market analyst Alejandro Arrieche reads a short-term downtrend below the major averages with thin buying liquidity in the current support band, warning that a slide beneath $1.26 would leave room toward $1.15; he counts the XRP Ledger lending protocol approval and regulatory easing around tokenized products as the factors that could eventually revive the price. What October changed was the flow picture, not the discount: inflows continued, approvals accumulated, and the market still closed the month at a level it first touched on the way down.