XRP price has collapsed roughly 67% from its all-time high, the deepest wound among major cryptocurrencies (the top 5 excluding stablecoins). Additionally, its market setup is turning more dangerous by the week.

This is not ordinary market weakness. A rare pileup of leveraged longs and a quiet retreat by the largest whales are combining to make XRP the most fragile major coin in the market.

XRP Price Has Fallen Harder Than Any Major Coin

A cross-asset drawdown tracker, which measures how far each coin sits below its record high, puts XRP dead last. The token is down about 67% from its peak, against roughly 48% for Bitcoin, 60% for Ethereum, and 56% for BNB.

The damage worsens over three months. XRP’s 90-day return sits near negative 21%, the worst of the four majors, and the token is 355 days from its peak with no recovery in sight.

That is the signature of a high-beta-alt regime. When risk appetite drops, XRP does not hold the line like a safe-haven asset. It amplifies the fall, dropping more than the market. As of now, it is trailing its peer average by over 12 percentage points.

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Repeated bounces have failed, with XRP’s recovery attempts rejected at resistance. The deeper question is what makes XRP fall faster than every coin besides it.

Crowded Longs Have Trapped XRP With No Buyers Left

The first driver is a one-sided derivatives book. A divergence read that compares the net-long bias of top traders (smart money) against the retail crowd shows both groups leaning long on XRP at once.

Top traders sit at a net-long bias of +29 and the retail crowd at +27, a divergence of just +2, which the tool flags as an aligned, or crowded, long. Nearly every participant is already positioned the same way.

Here is why that is dangerous. When almost everyone is already long, there is no fresh buyer left to lift the price. So the XRP price struggles to rise. And the moment it slips, leveraged longs are forced to sell into the drop, which drags it down faster. XRP traders have already lost $700 million in one such cascade this cycle.

Bitcoin carries none of this risk for now. Its read is neutral, with top traders at +2 against a retail crowd at +15, a negative divergence of 13. Big money is not crowding Bitcoin longs, so it has room to run that XRP does not.

The Biggest Whales Are Bailing at the Worst Moment

The final driver sits beneath the price. Santiment data on wallets holding 1 billion XRP or more shows their share of supply sliding from 39.4% on April 30 to about 38.65% now, a steady three-month decline.

The percentage looks small, but it covers billions of tokens and cuts against the earlier accumulation narratives. The strongest hands are selling, not adding.

This is the part that turns a bad setup into a trap. Whales are normally the buyers who absorb heavy selling and put a floor under the price. With the largest holders stepping back instead, that floor is thinning at the exact moment over-leveraged longs need someone to sell into. When the crowd is forced out, nothing is left to catch the token.

That is the full mechanism. Trapped longs on top and vanishing whale support underneath explain why XRP free-falls while its peers merely drift. XRP holders are already sitting on billions in unrealized losses, and only a flush of those longs or a return of whale buying would signal the end of pain.

Source: BeInCrypto