Why Hasn’t XRP Hit New Highs Like Bitcoin and Ethereum Despite Ripple Becoming a Top Financial Institution
XRP trades at $1.07, still 72% below its 2018 peak of $3.84, even after the SEC case closed and exchanges relisted it.
About 34 billion XRP were circulating at its 2018 peak against 63 billion today, so for XRP to hit its $3.84 ATH again the market cap would grow to $242 billion.
Nothing takes XRP off the market, since holders cannot stake it and the ledger burns 0.00001 XRP per transaction.
Owning XRP gives no claim on Ripple, and the company's $4 billion of acquisitions mostly settle in RLUSD rather than XRP.
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Bitcoin traded at less than a tenth of a cent in 2009 and reached $126,000 last October, with spot ETFs and a U.S. strategic reserve pulling institutional money in. Ethereum started at 42 cents in 2015 and reached $4,950 in August 2025, and it still carries most of the stablecoins and tokenized funds in crypto.
Meanwhile, Ripple launched in 2012, and XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) started trading in early 2013, but its all-time high is still the $3.84 it hit on January 4, 2018. At $1.07 today, XRP is 72% below a price it set more than eight years ago.
Ripple has spent the last few years building a regulated financial business, with a conditional U.S. national trust bank charter and a dollar stablecoin that settles trades for asset managers. So why hasn't the XRP price followed Bitcoin and Ethereum up?
Bitcoin traded at $0.0008 in October 2009 and took two years to reach a single dollar. It has peaked four times since, closing at $1,130 on November 30, 2013, $19,700 on December 16, 2017, $69,000 on November 10, 2021, and $126,000 on October 6, 2025.
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Bitcoin reached each of those peaks 12 to 18 months after a halving—the event that cuts the reward paid to miners and halves the rate of new supply. Fewer new coins reach the market while demand holds or grows, and the BTC price has climbed through every one of those windows.
However, every one of those rallies ended once the buyers ran out. Bitcoin crashed 75% or more after each peak, dropping to around $3,200 after 2017 and $15,479 after 2021. But it never went back to where the previous cycle started, which means its worst price in 2022 was almost five times its worst price in 2018.
Ethereum works differently, since it has no halving to cut its supply. It launched in July 2015, bottomed at $0.42 that October, rallied to roughly $1,400 in the 2018 mania, and set an all-time high of $4,880 on November 10, 2021. It then went close to four years without beating that price. Spot Ethereum ETFs launched in July 2024 and corporate treasuries started buying, and Ethereum hit a new record of $4,950 on August 24, 2025.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are well below their peaks today, with BTC around $64,000 and ETH near $1,875.
XRP started trading in February 2013 at around six-tenths of a cent, and it stayed under a penny for the next four years. Retail buyers piled into crypto through 2017 and drove XRP more than 50,000% higher in twelve months, past $3.00 by December. At its January 2018 peak of $3.84, XRP was worth over $130 billion and briefly became the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world, ahead of Ethereum.
XRP then spent 2018 through 2020 between $0.20 and $0.50. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, claiming XRP was an unregistered security, and U.S. exchanges delisted it. The XRP price fell from around $0.70 to $0.20 in about two weeks after that.
However, XRP still recovered to $1.96 by April 2021, roughly ten times that low. It finished the year 49% below its 2018 high while Bitcoin and Ethereum both set new record highs. And XRP hit almost $2 without Coinbase, Binance.US or Bitstamp listing it for American buyers.
XRP bottomed again at $0.29 in June 2022, then rallied when a July 2023 court ruling found that XRP sold on exchanges was not a security. Exchanges relisted it, the 2024 U.S. election brought buyers back into crypto, and the SEC case finally closed in August 2025.
That run pushed XRP to $3.65 on July 18, 2025, which left it about 5% short of its $3.84 ATH. XRP trades near $1.07 today and is worth around $67 billion, roughly half its value at the 2018 peak, and it now ranks sixth behind Bitcoin and Ethereum in first and second place.
The lawsuit explains why XRP lagged in 2021, when it rallied without access to U.S. exchanges. But by July 2025 XRP had its exchanges back, spot ETFs on the way and a closed SEC case, and it still stopped 5% short of its ATH.
The primary reason it failed to break its ATH is that there are far more XRP now. Around 34 billion coins were circulating at the 2018 peak, and $3.84 each made XRP worth $130 billion. About 63 billion are circulating today, so for XRP to hit the same $3.84 price, its market cap would grow to roughly $242 billion.
Ripple releases up to a billion XRP from escrow every month, then locks most of it straight back, so only a small fraction of that reaches the market. So, the increasing supply also hurts the price.
That growing supply would be less of a problem if something took XRP back out of circulation, and this is where Bitcoin and Ethereum differ. Bitcoin's halvings cut how many new coins reach the market every four years. Ethereum lets holders stake their coins, which locks them up and pays a return, and it destroys part of every transaction fee.
XRP has neither, since holders cannot stake it and the ledger burns 0.00001 XRP per transaction, so even a billion transactions would take just 10,000 XRP out of circulation.
Owning XRP gives you no claim on Ripple. The company is private, its shares are not the token, and the money its businesses earn goes to Ripple's shareholders. So the only route from Ripple's growth to the XRP price is if those businesses create demand for XRP.
But they mostly do not. Ripple has spent roughly $4 billion on acquisitions, and Hidden Road cost $1.25 billion and became Ripple Prime, its prime brokerage arm. GTreasury cost about $1 billion and became Ripple Treasury, whose platform already moves $12.5 trillion in corporate money. Rail added stablecoin payment rails, while Metaco and Standard Custody added custody. Each one earns fees in dollars.
RLUSD is what runs through them, and it has passed $1.5 billion in market cap since Ripple launched it in December 2024. Ripple also holds a conditional U.S. national trust bank charter, which exists so the company can hold RLUSD's reserves under federal supervision, with BNY Mellon as custodian.
A bank moving money needs the amount it sends to be the amount that arrives, and RLUSD holds its value at a dollar while XRP can move 40% in a year. So in the tokenized fund deals Ripple signed this year, RLUSD settles the trade and XRP pays the 0.00001 network fee.
That could change if Ripple gets a Federal Reserve master account, since direct access to Fed payment rails would strengthen the argument for using XRP to bridge between currencies, which is the job Ripple built it for—but the application is still pending.
Two things could take XRP back to $3.84. Either roughly $242 billion flows into it, or something starts locking coins away so the supply available to trade shrinks.
The XRP Ledger's lending protocol would be a start, since it would let holders lock XRP into vaults that fund fixed-term loans and pay a set return. It has been waiting on validator approval since January, and only about a fifth of trusted validators have backed it against the 80% it needs.
The bigger change would be XRP replacing RLUSD as the settlement asset in Ripple's tokenized fund business. That runs into the problem that made Ripple choose RLUSD to begin with, because institutions will not settle in an asset that volatile, and XRP will keep moving like that until enough of it gets locked away to steady the price.
XRP is still up roughly 18,000% from the six-tenths of a cent it first traded at, so the coin did grow. But all of that growth just came before 2018.
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