Roasting Ripple: XRP Army finally becomes the smart money

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . True believers of an impending altcoin season now have their most compelling evidence to date: XRP is at all-time highs (sort of), and the XRP Army is finally looking like the smart ones in the room. It’s for sure a big deal. Price records for XRP have turned out to be crypto’s answer to Haley’s comet: They only come around once every half-decade or so. Which is eons around here. There’ve been mixed reports over whether XRP has really broken its 2018 peak. A Fortune piece yesterday pointed out that XRP’s all-time high is $3.84 on Binance while CoinGecko says $3.40. XRP reached as high as $3.3991 on Binance on Thursday afternoon, per TradingView data. So eh, close enough. Not to mention, Ripple Labs CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz has historically been adamant that XRP had never actually reached $3.84 in 2018 for most of the crypto trading world. That price was supposedly met only briefly on South Korean exchanges, which at the time placed a hefty premium on many top coins, including BTC and XRP. Keep in mind that the goal for most crypto traders and investors is to avoid “round-tripping” their bags — holding coins from bull market top to bear market trough and back again. Real roundtripping in XRP’s case would mean holding through a 90% collapse between January 2018 and December 2019, and another 80% drop between April 2021 and the following June. Here’s the rub: because XRP’s last all-time high was so long ago, its equivalent today would be much higher due to US dollar inflation. What was $3.40 in 2018’s money would now be $4.25. XRP would need to rally by another 25% or so to break its inflation-adjusted all-time high, as shown by the beige area at the top of the chart above. But that’s only against the dollar. XRP’s bitcoin and ether ratios continue to be firmly underwater, even despite its near-500% rally since this time last year. The purple line on the chart below plots XRP’s performance against ETH, while the pink line is its BTC ratio. XRP has lost 64% of its value against ETH since Ethereum launched in 2015 and 42% against BTC over its record trading history, starting in 2013. No matter. XRP’s rally is still very much a symbol of a crypto groundswell in the US ahead of Trump’s second term. A sign of the times that screams the US is open for crypto business. Take Ripple’s branding and communication in its early years: “crypto” and “blockchain” were curiously absent right up until mid-2017 , instead opting to present its distributed ledger as a payments protocol similar to email. Now, they’re “ pioneers in crypto .” If there was such a thing as reverse chain abstraction , Ripple has nailed it. And it’s paying off. Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter . Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter . Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more. The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.