On Wednesday, August 12, we published a piece naming $1.00 as the structural line for XRP and argued the weekly close was the thing to watch. That line has now broken twice inside five days, first on Tuesday, August 11 and then far more convincingly on Friday, August 14. Our own pull at 12:03 UTC on Sunday, August 16 put XRP at $0.9991 on the CoinGecko aggregate and $0.9992 on the Phemex XRP-USDT perpetual, a fraction under the level it has now failed to defend on two separate attempts.
The two breaks were not the same trade, and the difference between them is the entire read on what the Monday session does next.
What the Two Breaks Actually Looked Like
Hourly data tells a story the daily candles hide completely. Both breaks show up as a small wick on a daily chart. Underneath, they were built by different flows and they resolved in different ways.
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Break
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UTC window
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Low print
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Volume in the hour of the low
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Time spent under $1.00
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First
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Tuesday, August 11, 14:00
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$0.9901
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~3.6 million XRP
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About two hours
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Second
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Friday, August 14, 18:00 to 23:00
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$0.9847
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~2.3 million XRP
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About six hours
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The first break was a single violent hour, the heaviest hourly volume print of the entire five-day window, and the level was reclaimed by 15:00 UTC. Price then spent Wednesday and Thursday grinding back to $1.02 and holding, which is exactly why the $1.00 floor read looked defensible at the time.
The second break was slower and it worked. XRP slipped under the level at 18:00 UTC on Friday and never got back above it that session, ticking down through five consecutive hourly candles before the 22:00 UTC hour took it to the low. The hour immediately before that one traded 293,000 XRP, so the flush hour represented close to an eightfold expansion. Volume expanding into a level rather than away from it is what separates a wick from a break.
One correction worth making, because the number is everywhere. The figure circulating across coverage since August 11 is a 52-week low of $0.9915 printed that Tuesday. Two independent pulls put the August 11 low at $0.9901, and neither puts the low of the run on August 11 at all. The deepest print of the move is $0.9847 on Friday, August 14. The widely repeated number is neither the correct Tuesday low nor the correct low of the sequence.
Why 22:00 UTC on a Friday Matters More Than the Level
Timing did most of the work. The 22:00 UTC hour on Friday, August 14 lands after the US cash equity close, at the point in the week when market-maker inventory gets flattened and books thin out ahead of two sessions with no institutional bid behind them. A $0.98 print in that book takes materially less capital than the same print during a Tuesday New York morning.
That cuts in both directions, and this is where readers usually get it wrong. A break made in a thin book is cheap to manufacture, so it says less about real supply. But it is equally cheap to defend, which means the recovery that followed carries no more weight than the break did.
The Weekend Hold Is Not a Reclaim
XRP was back above $1.00 by 01:00 UTC on Saturday, August 15 and spent most of Saturday and Sunday oscillating in a band roughly $0.009 wide. Our Phemex perpetual pull at 12:04 UTC on Sunday, August 16 showed a 24-hour range of $0.9965 to $1.0056 and funding at roughly minus 0.002% per eight-hour period.
Slightly negative funding means there is no crowded long paying to hold this level, and no aggressive short crowd leaning on it either. Positioning is close to flat, which is another way of saying the market has not committed to a side yet.
A reclaim only counts when it happens with the full book present, and the first time that condition is met is the Monday, August 17 session. Readers seeing this at the Monday open are looking at the answer rather than the setup.
What $0.95 Actually Decides
Below $1.00 the chart is close to empty. XRP has not traded meaningfully under the dollar since November 2024, which leaves very little recent volume-by-price structure for buyers to lean on. That absence is what makes the next shelf load-bearing, and it is a different problem from the one we were mapping when the $1.09 level was the fight. Every level above the dollar had a prior battle behind it. This one does not.
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Level
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What it is
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What losing it opens
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$1.00
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Reclaimed and lost twice inside five days
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Re-tests of the August 14 low at $0.9847
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$0.95
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First genuine shelf under the dollar
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A $0.80 to $0.95 range
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$0.80
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The measured breakdown target from the range
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Analyst floor scenarios near $0.70 into Q4
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The precedent behind those levels is the reason to take them seriously rather than treat them as chart decoration. XRP closed below $1.00 on November 26, 2021 and did not reclaim it until November 16, 2024, close to three years spent under a round number. The mechanism was not exotic. Round numbers accumulate resting supply from everyone who bought above them, so every rally back into the level meets sellers who have been waiting to get out flat.
XRP is down roughly 46% from $1.84 at the start of January and roughly 68% from its 52-week high of $3.12 on September 14, 2025. A trader reading the ETF flow backdrop alongside the chart should note that no post-Friday flow data had been published at the time of writing, because August 15 and 16 fall on a weekend and Friday, August 14 is the last retrievable session.
The XRPL Lending Vote Is Stalling, Not Passing
The other open thread from our August 12 piece is the pair of XRP Ledger amendments that would put lending on the base protocol. We pulled the live amendment table at 12:04 UTC on Sunday, August 16 and the numbers are worse than most coverage implies.
SingleAssetVault, the XLS-65 amendment, has 14 of 35 trusted validators voting yes. That is 40.0%. LendingProtocol, the XLS-66 amendment, has 13 of 35, or 37.1%. Activation requires 28 of those 35 validators, an 80% supermajority, and it has to hold continuously for two full weeks before the amendment enables.
Neither amendment has ever entered that two-week countdown. The live record carries a null majority timestamp for both, which is the ledger's own way of saying the 80% threshold has never once been crossed. Calling this "approaching activation" gets the picture backwards, because XLS-65 needs fourteen more validators and XLS-66 needs fifteen. Support has moved from earlier tracking around 22% and 20%, so the direction is right. The slope is the problem.
Why an amendment can sit at 40% for weeks. Nothing forces a validator to decide. No deadline exists, amendments do not expire, and abstaining costs nothing, so a validator that does not vote yes is declining to take a position rather than voting no. On-ledger crypto lending is also a heavier ask than most amendments, because it writes loan origination, interest accrual, default enforcement and liquidation logic into the protocol itself. A smart-contract lending market can fail without taking the chain down with it. Logic that lives inside consensus itself has no such escape hatch, and operators who are comfortable running a trading primitive are not automatically comfortable running credit risk.
A dependency sits on top of that. XLS-66 builds its lending mechanics on the vault structure defined by XLS-65, so two votes have to clear in sequence rather than in parallel. What actually moves validators is running code plus visible institutional demand, never announcements, and Ripple's own validator moved to yes around August 10 without shifting the aggregate much. For a working comparison, the PermissionedDEX amendment reached 28 of 34 validators and enabled on February 18, 2026. That is what a passing amendment looks like, and it looks nothing like 14 of 35.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is $0.98 the bottom for XRP?
Nothing in the current tape confirms a bottom. The $0.9847 print was made in a thin Friday-evening book, and lows set in thin conditions get retested in full ones far more often than they hold. The level to watch for confirmation is $0.95, not the August low.
Why did XRP fall below $1.00 when nothing bad happened to Ripple?
Round-number levels break on positioning rather than news. XRP has been bleeding relative strength since January without a specific catalyst, and once resting bids at $1.00 were absorbed there was no fresh buyer to replace them. Structural weakness rarely arrives with a headline attached.
Does the XRPL lending amendment vote affect the XRP price?
Not at 40% support it does not. Amendment votes only become tradeable events once support crosses 80% and the two-week countdown begins, because that is the first moment activation has a date. Anything before that is a sentiment story, and this market has already shown it will not pay for one.
How long could XRP stay under $1.00 after this break?
The one prior instance took almost three years, from November 2021 to November 2024. That is a sample of one and not a forecast, though it does explain why reclaiming a round number is harder than losing one. Overhead supply from trapped buyers has to clear before the level flips back.
Bottom Line
The Monday, August 17 session is the first honest test of $1.00 since the Friday break, because it is the first time a full order book is present to price it. A daily close back above the level on expanding volume repairs the structure and puts $1.05 in play. A rejection sets up a retest of $0.9847, and losing that opens $0.95 as the only meaningful shelf before a $0.80 to $0.95 range. On the ledger side, treat 80% validator support as the only number that matters, because 40% and 37% are a stall rather than a countdown. Watch what the book does at $1.00 while New York is awake, and ignore what the weekend chart appeared to promise.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
