XRP Negative Sentiment Hits a 3-Month High as Price Struggles Near $1

The XRP price has fallen from $1.08 to $1.00 over those thirty days. However, more people are using the XRP Ledger than at any point since June, and Santiment argues the crowd has this wrong because usage is climbing while sentiment falls.

So has the negativity gone far enough to signal a bottom, or is the crowd simply right?

XRP Sentiment Is at a Three-Month Bearish Extreme

XRP commentary has hit a three-month bearish extreme across X, Reddit and Telegram, according to Santiment, which measures both how often a token gets mentioned and the tone people use. Negativity surged through the past week as the XRP price failed to rally.

Traders watch these extremes because of what they imply about supply. When almost everyone has turned bearish, most of the people who wanted to sell have already sold, which leaves less XRP waiting to hit the market on any bounce. That is the reasoning behind Santiment’s call, and it is why a pessimistic reading gets treated as a buy signal rather than a warning.

Moreover, the price data supports the mood. The XRP price has fallen 7.8% over the past 30 days while Bitcoin slipped 0.5% and Ethereum gained 3.2%, so XRP is falling far faster than the other majors. It also trades 2.8% lower over the past week, down from $1.03, with a market value of $62.71 billion.

Why XRP’s On-Chain Signals Are Weaker Than They Look

Santiment paired XRP’s negative sentiment with rising participation on the ledger. On August 14, the XRP Ledger recorded 49,929 active addresses in a single 24-hour span—its highest count in more than two months—after activity in early July had dropped to its lowest of 2026.

On July 5, whales pulled 46.5 million XRP off Binance as the XRP price topped $1.15, moving coins into private wallets instead of selling into the high—and a smaller spike of 6 million followed on August 7. Since then, XRP leaving Binance has stayed compressed near a baseline of about 312,000 tokens, according to CryptoQuant, even as the price bled from $1.14 to $0.99. Holders have neither dumped their coins nor moved them back onto the exchange.

However, the activity spike does not mean what the count suggests. The ledger processed 1.39 million transactions on August 11, and 928,521 of those were offers, against just 301,226 payments. An offer is an order placed on the ledger’s built-in exchange, so two-thirds of that day’s traffic was people posting orders rather than sending XRP anywhere.

Most of those orders came from market-making bots, which post buy and sell orders on both sides of the book at the same time, then reuse the same order sequence to cancel and repost as prices move. That generates enormous transaction counts without any net buying. The spike also proved short-lived, since XRPScan recorded 890,743 transactions on August 16, with 374,536 payments running ahead of 322,070 offers.

Moreover, neither metric can show what actually matters. Most buying happens inside an exchange’s order book, where no transaction touches the ledger at all, so a quiet chain looks identical whether investors are accumulating or doing nothing.

What Would Turn XRP Around?

Sentiment readings don’t actually move the XRP price, and the money that does has slowed to a trickle. XRP ETFs recorded $3.27 million through the first ten trading days of August, against $27.29 million across July, which is 96% below the $666.61 million they gathered in their first trading month back in November 2025. In July alone, those funds recorded zero flows on 10 of 17 trading days.

Overall, investors have put $1.51 billion into XRP ETFs since they launched, and the funds hold $933 million today. Anyone who bought into them is down on their position, which is a large part of why fresh money has stopped coming in.

XRP has been trading between two clear levels since June. The $1 to $1.05 band has held as support every time the price tested it, and each recovery attempt in June, July and August stalled between $1.09 and $1.10.

The Senate could change that on September 15, when it holds a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the procedural step that ends debate and forces the bill onto the floor. That bill would classify XRP as a commodity under federal law, which is the outcome institutional buyers have been waiting on, and nothing else is scheduled before then.

Can Extreme Negativity Turn Into an XRP Rally?

Extreme negativity has marked bottoms for XRP before, but only when buyers were already stepping in underneath the price. Nothing in the current data shows that happening, so we don’t think this pessimism marks a floor.

Two things would show it changing. Four consecutive weeks of ETF inflows above $10 million would mean institutional money is coming back, and a move above $1.10 would clear the level that has capped every rally attempt since June.