XRP saw a strong rally on Friday, rising about 18% in 24 hours to trade near $1.49 after a deep sell-off a day earlier made it the worst performer among major tokens.
The move came as bitcoin briefly rose above $70,000 in US morning hours, reversing Thursday’s sharp declines ahead of the weekend.
The bounce came after
The data shows short liquidations of about $26 million in the last 24 hours, compared to about $30 million in long positions the previous Thursday.
That imbalance matters. It suggests that the market was not reacting to new bad news but was instead mechanically eliminating bullish bets as prices fell. Once those positions were forced to close, the selling pressure eased and XRP was able to recover quickly.
The rally also comes at an awkward time for the broader XRP narrative. Ripple and its ecosystem spent last week laying out a more institutional future for the XRP Ledger, including plans for permissioned marketplaces, lending, and privacy tools.
Flare, a closely watched project attempting to bring a DeFi-style utility to XRP via FXRP, also expanded institutional access through custody firm Hex Trust.
But none of that helped XRP sentiment when the market broke down.
Friday’s rally, then, looks less like investors suddenly buying into the “institutional DeFi” narrative and more like a classic crypto pullback: a sharp drop, a disappearance of leverage, then a quick bounce once the forced sellers are gone.
Meanwhile, a ratio of bullish versus bearish bets on XRP futures tracking shows that retail long positions were eliminated, but large traders were leaning the other way.
On Binance, the overall account-based long/short ratio is 2.13 as of Friday, meaning there were roughly twice as many accounts positioned long as short. This is usually a sign of overcrowded bullish positioning – many smaller traders are expecting a bounce.
But at the same time, the long/short (positions) of top Binance traders are ~0.73, which means top Binance traders were net short.
That split suggests that
And once those long positions were liquidated,
