XRP (XRP) technical analysis today

08/18/2026

XRP Daily Pulse Aug 18: Dollar Ceiling Holds Firm

Where We Left It: Yesterday's Call Is Still Live

Since yesterday's update, XRP has basically gone nowhere fast — down about 0.2%, slipping from roughly $0.9998 to around $0.9979. That sounds boring, and in a way it is. But underneath the flat line, the market structure is doing something worth paying attention to.

The prior short call — entry at $1.003, stop at $1.01, target at $0.9855 — is still live. It hasn't been stopped out, and it hasn't hit target either. It's just sitting there, patiently working, while price continues to chop under the same overhead resistance that's capped every rally since late July.

Until that pattern breaks, this stays a sell-the-bounce market, not a buy-the-dip one. Here's the full picture, timeframe by timeframe.

15-Minute Intraday: Chop Inside a Falling Channel

Zooming into today's 15-minute chart, XRP tried to push higher early in the session, got turned away almost immediately, and spent most of the day grinding lower inside a tight falling channel. Price dipped toward the low-$0.90s zone before dip-buyers stepped back in and dragged it back up to about $0.998.

The structure is choppy, but the lower highs inside that channel tell you sellers are still setting the intraday pace. In plain terms: XRP bounced around all day but stayed stuck below $1. No breakout, no breakdown — just controlled chop with a slight downward lean.

4-Hour Structure: Lower Highs Since Late July

Step back to the 4-hour chart and the picture sharpens. XRP has been carving lower highs since that swing peak near $1.10 back on July 30th. Every rally since then has run into the same descending trendline and gotten sold straight back down.

Right now, price is sitting almost exactly on that trendline again — which makes this a genuine decision point. Either buyers finally reclaim it and force a shift in structure, or sellers keep the pattern intact and push XRP into another leg down. In plain terms: the bigger 4-hour trend is still pointing down, and today's price action hasn't done anything to change that yet.

Daily Chart: Pressing the $0.9862 Floor

On the daily timeframe, the trend since May has been one long staircase down. Right now XRP is leaning directly on a support shelf near $0.9862, a level that has already held more than once this week.

The old resistance zone near $1.55 is essentially irrelevant at this point — that's a relic from a completely different market regime. What actually matters right now is this tightening channel between the $0.9862 floor and the $1.04 ceiling, and whether the floor holds one more time before something breaks.

Momentum Check: RSI Is Soft, MACD Still Bearish

RSI (14) — Neutral, No Extreme Either Way

The daily RSI is sitting around 37. That's soft, below the 50 midline, but it's not down in oversold territory below 30. This isn't a market that's been beaten down to an extreme — it's just quietly losing momentum. There's no divergence flashing here either, meaning RSI is agreeing with price rather than fighting it.

MACD — Bearish Cross Still in Control

The MACD tells the same story from a different angle. Both the MACD line and the signal line sit below the zero line, and the MACD is still under its signal — a bearish setup. The histogram bars are negative, meaning the gap between the two lines is still working in sellers' favor. Nothing here has flipped since the last real bullish push faded out in early July.

Positioning & Order Flow: Retail Is Long, Smart Money Is Cautious

Funding is basically flat at 0.006%, so there's no crowded directional bet showing up in the funding rate itself. But open interest has climbed 13% over the past week, meaning fresh leverage is stacking up into this exact range — right where price keeps stalling.

Translation: retail is leaning long into resistance while smart money hedges — a classic setup for a squeeze against the crowd if that ask wall near $1.04 doesn't give way. The liquidation heatmap above shows exactly why that wall matters — a cluster of leveraged longs sits stacked just under $1.04, meaning a rejection there could cascade quickly if stops start triggering.

Today's Drivers: Sentiment, Stablecoins, and a Billion-Dollar Bitcoin Bet

Away from the charts, sentiment trackers show XRP mood at its most bearish in three months — even though on-chain activity is actually holding up. That gap between bearish sentiment and steady usage is often a contrarian tell worth watching.

Longer-horizon models are still treating the $1.00–$1.06 range as a floor for any eventual recovery, and one popular price-prediction model from Binance keeps XRP pinned right around $1 heading into mid-September.

• A Treasury proposal addressing who can legally sell stablecoins is circulating in crypto policy circles
• Reports of a near billion-dollar Bitcoin position tied to Jane Street are making headlines
• Neither story is a direct XRP catalyst today — they're background macro hum that keeps overall risk appetite in focus

None of this changes the technical picture. It's context, not a catalyst — the real story today is still the chart.

The Setup: Trade Plan and What Flips the Bias

The desk read here is a short, playing the range rather than chasing a breakout. Risk-reward on this setup is roughly 1:2.5 — not investment advice, just how the levels line up on the chart.

The one level that kills this thesis is a clean, sustained close above $1.04. That's where the heavy ask wall sits, and that's where the lower-highs pattern on the 4-hour would finally break. Until then, every bounce toward $1 is a fade, not a breakout — and the floor at $0.9862 is the line in the sand for how much longer buyers can keep absorbing the pressure.

Summary: The Range Holds, For Now

XRP keeps punching at $1 and keeps getting sent back. Funding is flat, but leverage is quietly building underneath the surface. Retail traders are piling into longs at roughly a 3:1 ratio while the smarter, top-trader cohort stays far more cautious near 2:1. There's a wall of orders sitting just above spot at $1.04 that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this range — and yesterday's short call is still open, still working, still untouched.

Until XRP either reclaims $1.04 with conviction or loses the $0.9862 floor for good, this is a range to trade, not a trend to chase. We'll be back tomorrow with the next update.

Watch that day's video

08/17/2026

XRP Price Today: The Dollar Wall Holds Again (Aug 17)

Yesterday's Call: Still Live, Still Working

Before we get into today's setup, a quick scorecard. On August 16, we flagged the dollar wall and called a short from $1.0050, stop at $1.0116, target at $0.9775. Twenty-four hours later, price hasn't gone anywhere — from $1.00 down to $0.9998. That's essentially flat.

That flatness is the whole story of today's XRP price action. Underneath a boring candle, pressure is building. Let's walk through it layer by layer — intraday, structure, momentum, positioning — and land on what actually matters: the trade.

XRP Price Today: The Snapshot

XRP is sitting at $0.9999, basically flat on the day, boxed inside a range of $0.9882 to $1.01. On the surface, nothing's happening. Underneath, three things are diverging from that calm: open interest is surging, taker flow is aggressively selling, and momentum on both RSI and MACD is soft.

This isn't a base for a breakout — it reads more like consolidation before a decision. Nothing screams panic, but the weight of evidence leans toward the sellers into the $1.04 ask wall overhead.

15-Minute Intraday: Chop Inside the Chop

Zoom into today's session and XRP has been chopping hard between $0.99 and $1.01. There's a short-term rising channel building through the middle of the day — basically an uptrend nested inside a bigger sideways range. Two volume spikes stand out: one red, one green, marking spots where liquidity got swept on both sides of the book.

Right now price sits almost exactly back where it opened, at $1.00. That's a market digesting, not deciding. In plain terms: XRP is stuck bouncing around one dollar all day, and tight digestion like this usually resolves with a sharper move once it finally breaks one way.

4-Hour Structure: Pressing the Ceiling of a Downtrend

The bigger four-hour picture is less ambiguous. XRP has been sliding lower since the middle of the month — from highs near $1.09 down to today's dollar zone — all inside a clean descending channel. Price is currently pressing right against that channel's upper boundary, the exact spot that's rejected every bounce for the past week.

One detail worth flagging: volume on this latest test is shrinking compared to the sharp red bar mid-month. Sellers aren't showing up with the same force this time. That said, the trend structure itself hasn't changed — the downtrend since early August is still intact until proven otherwise.

Daily Chart: The Squeeze Toward $0.9862

On the daily timeframe, the slide from over $1.50 back in May has flattened into a tightening channel just above $0.9862. That level is the nearby floor — price has tested and bounced off it multiple times over the past week.

The $1.55 resistance up top is a relic of May's high; it's nowhere near today's action and doesn't matter for this trade. What matters is that price keeps compressing tighter and tighter into the $0.9862 floor — and that kind of compression usually means a decisive break isn't far off.

Momentum Check: RSI and MACD Both Say 'Not Yet'

RSI is sitting at 37 right now — neutral territory, not the deeply oversold reading you'd want for a genuine bounce signal. Looking back across the year, RSI peaked near 70 in January and has been printing progressively lower highs since, matching price's own downtrend. There's no divergence forming yet, meaning momentum and price are still moving together, not fighting each other.

MACD tells the same story. The MACD line is running below its signal line and the histogram bars are printing negative — bearish momentum is still in charge, even if it's not accelerating. Compare that to the sharp positive histogram bars back in April and May: this current dip is shallow by comparison, more of a grind than a slide.

Liquidations, Order Flow, and the Retail Trap

Funding is basically flat at -0.0017%, so leverage isn't skewed hard either way on cost. But open interest jumped over 25% in a week to around 414 million XRP — that's real leverage building into a flat price, and it's exactly the kind of setup that resolves violently once it breaks.

Here's the trap: retail is piling into longs three-to-one, while the smarter money — top traders — is far less convinced, sitting under two-to-one. Meanwhile actual taker flow at 0.72 shows sellers hitting the bid harder than buyers are lifting the ask. The order book leans 55% bids on paper, but the ask wall at $1.04 physically outweighs the bid wall at $0.95.

Translation: retail is leaning long into a market that's quietly getting sold. That's a classic setup for a squeeze lower once the range finally breaks — the crowd gets caught leaning the wrong way just as leverage unwinds.

The Trade Setup: Levels That Matter Today

Putting it together: flat price, rising open interest, sell-heavy taker flow, soft momentum, and a retail crowd leaning long into resistance. The weight of evidence still favors the bears into the $1.04 ceiling, with $0.9862 as the immediate battleground below.

The bias flips the moment price closes decisively above the $1.04 ask wall on strong volume — that would suggest the shrinking-volume rejection we've seen all week has finally run out of sellers. Until then, the setup favors fading strength back toward $0.9862, with $0.95 as the deeper floor if that level gives way.

The Bottom Line

XRP's dollar wall held again today. Price barely moved, but the internals — open interest up 25%, taker flow sell-heavy, retail crowded into longs — tell a more interesting story than the candle does. This is compression, not calm, and compression this tight rarely stays quiet for long.

Keep $0.9862 and $1.04 on your radar. One is the level that keeps this bearish lean intact; the other is the one that kills it. Everything else is noise until one of those breaks.

Watch that day's video