One of the cryptocurrency industry's largest market makers has turned bearish on XRP. Wintermute, the company that provides infrastructure for many of the market's trading activities, has opened a 10x leveraged short position on the token's price, adding to a broader set of bearish bets on several major-cap cryptocurrencies. The London-based firm, founded in 2017, is primarily a liquidity provider, and such businesses typically earn from spreads and order flow rather than directional price moves — one reason large leveraged positions from major market makers draw attention as a window into how professional desks are positioned. Firms of this type also routinely use derivatives to hedge inventory and offset exposure held elsewhere, so an on-chain short is not always a pure directional bet.

XRP Short Valued Just Above $10 Million

A dashboard screenshot from On-Chain Lens analytics provides a clear picture of the position: the current 10x XRP short sits at just above $10 million in value, down by $112.2K since the play was carried out. At present, the position is 595% away from liquidation.

On August 23, 2026, On-Chain Lens reported on X:

WINTERMUTE IS DOUBLING DOWN ON SHORTS WHILE MOVING HUGE FUNDS TO BINANCE 🐻 They have deposited millions more into Hyperliquid and increased their short exposure from $146.19M to $190.77M, adding ~$44.58M in shorts since our last update. Top 5 short positions: • $ETH : $53.02M… pic.twitter.com/Z79o7Fbj76

— Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens), August 23, 2026

The short is a cross-margin style setup on a large account with substantial overall equity, which places its liquidation price far above the $1.50 entry — specifically at $10.52. That is typical for shorts when margin is shared across many positions. Liquidation levels can also change as positions are adjusted. The exposure flagged in the update sits on Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetual-futures exchange, where wallet-level positions are publicly visible on-chain — the transparency that lets analytics platforms such as On-Chain Lens track them as they are opened and adjusted.

Liquidation Would Require Tripling the All-Time High

For the trade to end in a complete wipe-out of the XRP short position, the popular altcoin would have to triple its current all-time high of $3.65, a level hit roughly a year ago. The current XRP price setup is showing signs of a price trend reversal near that level, but the $1.50 line has to be conquered first.

Wintermute's other notable short-selling positions revolve around Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), and Solana (SOL), carried with more aggressive leverage of between 15x and 20x. These positions hold a combined value of $190.77 million, freshly increasing the firm's short-selling exposure by roughly $44.58 million — a move that stands in contrast to the broader leveraged market trend.

Shorts Pay for Bulls as Funding Rate Hits Yearly High

While the overall long-versus-short ratio sits slightly on the bearish side at 0.9387, short sellers have been increasingly paying for the XRP bulls' positions. That dynamic is evident in the skyrocketing open interest (OI) weighted funding rate, which has climbed to a yearly high. In perpetual futures — the instruments that account for a large share of crypto trading volume — funding rates are the periodic payments exchanged between the two sides of a position, which is why they are widely watched as a gauge of how crowded leveraged positioning has become.

XRP's price is currently coiling in an extended demand range between $1.35 and $1.50, a zone that bulls might flip into long-term support. At the same time, XRP's institutional interest is picking up again, with the Ripple-native token-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) — the first U.S. spot XRP funds began trading in 2025 — showcasing their best performance in a quarter of a year, making ETF flows a key gauge of that institutional demand alongside on-chain positioning data.

Given that piqued interest across the board continues, XRP's $2 price tag will be the next crucial threshold to watch — provided the altcoin successfully conquers the $1.50 confluent resistance bubble, as the broader digital asset market rebound continues for a third week straight.

Source: DailyCoin