XRP vs HYPE: Which Beaten-Down Coin Recovers First?

Hyperliquid’s HYPE trades near $55 today, about 28% below the all-time high it set on June 16, and it has only been falling for eight weeks. XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) trades at $1.02, roughly 73% below its own all-time high, and it has been falling for 13 months straight.

Both coins are deep in the red, but XRP has lost around $146 billion in market value over those 13 months, while HYPE spent the first half of this year climbing and has only just started giving some of it back. So which one recovers first?

How Far XRP and HYPE Have Fallen

XRP has been slowly declining since the start of the year. The XRP price closed December 2025 at $1.84, February at $1.39, and July at $1.06, and nine of the past twelve months ended below where they started.

XRP did manage higher closes in April and July, but each bounce topped out under the one before it, so anyone who bought during one rally was underwater by the next.

In market value, XRP was worth about $210 billion at its July 2025 peak and is worth roughly $64 billion today, which means around $146 billion has come off in 13 months.

Meanwhile, HYPE spent most of that period climbing. The HYPE price traded as low as $20.50 over the past year, climbed to an all-time high of $76.70 on June 16, and has since fallen to $55, which is 28% down. Even after that fall, HYPE is still up more than 160% from its low.

So XRP holders who bought at any point in the past year are down and have a reason to sell into any rally, while most HYPE holders are still in profit and are under no pressure at all.

XRP’s Recovery Hangs on the Senate’s September Vote

The CLARITY Act is the only thing that could turn XRP around, and the Senate holds a cloture vote on it on September 15. Cloture is the procedural step that lets debate begin, so it needs 60 votes before the bill itself can even reach the floor. Traders on Polymarket now put its chances of becoming law this year at 14%, down from 82% in February.

The SEC and CFTC already classified XRP as a digital commodity back in March, so the bill would not change what XRP is. What it would add is permanence, and that is what pension funds and asset managers have been waiting for, since an agency can rewrite its own rule and a future administration can reverse it.

The XRP Ledger cannot fill that gap on its own, because the network fee is 0.00001 XRP per transaction. Even if payment volume doubled tomorrow, that would barely move demand for the token, so a single Senate vote has become the whole argument.

Meanwhile, investors have almost stopped buying while they wait. XRP ETF inflows fell from $131.94 million in May to $59.46 million in June and $27.29 million in July, and only about $1 million has arrived so far in August.

However, large holders are buying what everyone else is selling. Wallets have been accumulating more than 10 million XRP a day, 91% of the XRP leaving Binance is going to large holder addresses, and the XRP price has closed above $1 for more than 600 straight days. Those holders are betting on the vote rather than on anything XRP is doing now, and if it fails they are simply the last ones in before another leg down. 

HYPE’s Recovery Runs on Its Trading Fees

People pay fees to trade on Hyperliquid, and about 99% of that money goes into an Assistance Fund that buys HYPE on the open market. Over the past year that buying has run between $53 million and $83 million a month, and it keeps happening as long as people keep trading, with nobody needing to approve it.

However, the unlock schedule works against it. Core contributors receive 9.92 million tokens on the sixth of every month, worth roughly $548 million at today’s HYPE price, which is around seven times what the fund buys back over the same period.

In practice, only a fraction of those tokens reach the market. When the July tranche came due, the calendar showed about $645 million, and the release came and went without the selling people expected. The Assistance Fund also holds about 45.65 million HYPE of its own, roughly 4.6 times a single monthly unlock, so it has the firepower to soak one up. The next release arrives on September 6.

The catch is that all of this depends on the fees. Recent on-chain reporting shows fees being routed to the HIP-3 deployer address while some trading volume moves to TradeXYZ, and both of those shrink the pool available for buybacks.

On top of that, the buyback buys hardest when trading volumes are high, which means the support fades exactly when a falling market would need it most.

Which Beaten-Down Coin Recovers First?

Between the two cryptos, HYPE is the most likely to rebound first. Most HYPE holders are still up on their positions, so nobody is waiting to sell into the first rally. XRP has 13 months of trapped buyers who will sell the moment they get back to break-even, so every rally runs into people trying to get out, and that will keep adding bearish pressure on the price.

That said, XRP could recover quickly if the CLARITY Act finally gets voted into law this year. Polymarket puts the odds of that at 14%, down from 82% in February, so the market has already priced in failure and a yes vote could send XRP much higher than anything HYPE does.

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