XRP saw a strong rebound on Friday, rising about 18% over 24 hours to trade near $1.49 after a sharp sell-off a day earlier that made it the worst performer among the major tokens.
The move came as bitcoin briefly rose more than $70,000 in the morning in the United States, reversing Thursday’s sharp declines ahead of the weekend.
The rebound came after XRP crashed to around $1.14 in the previous session, a move that triggered heavy liquidations and chased away traders who relied too heavily on leverage.
The data shows short-term liquidations of around $26 million in the past 24 hours, compared to around $30 million in long-term liquidations earlier Thursday.
This imbalance is important. This suggests that the market was not reacting to new bad news as much as it was mechanically eliminating bullish bets as prices slipped. Once these positions were closed, the selling pressure eased and XRP was able to rebound quickly.
The recovery also comes at a difficult time for the broader XRP narrative. Ripple and its ecosystem have spent the last week proposing a more institutional future for the XRP Ledger, including plans for permissioned marketplaces, lending, and privacy tools.
Flare, a closely watched project trying to bring DeFi-style utility to XRP through FXRP, has also expanded institutional access through custody firm Hex Trust.
But none of this helped XRP sentiment as the market crashed.
Friday’s rally therefore looks less like investors suddenly embracing the “institutional DeFi” narrative than a classic crypto throwback: a sharp fall, an erasure of leverage, then a rapid rebound once the forced sellers left.
Meanwhile, a ratio of bullish and bearish bets on futures contracts tracking XRP shows that retail long positions were eliminated, but large traders were leaning the other way.
On Binance, the overall account-based long/short ratio was 2.13 on Friday, meaning there were approximately 2x as many accounts positioned long as short. This is generally a sign of tight bullish positioning: many small traders are expecting a rebound.
But at the same time, Binance’s top trader long/short (positions) is around 0.73, meaning the biggest traders on Binance were net short.
This split suggests that the XRP dump was not random: it likely ran into a market where smaller traders were stubbornly long, while larger players were positioned to take advantage of a flush.
And once those long positions were settled, XRP did what it usually does after a wipeout: it pulled back violently, as there wasn’t much selling left.
