XRP rose as much as 14.21% in 24 hours to $1.40 on Friday, making it the best-performing asset among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

The daily candle closed above both the 50-day and 200-day EMAs for the first time since XRP's death cross locked in earlier this month. The move rides the same Bitcoin short squeeze and Treasury-driven liquidity wave that has been moving through crypto markets all week.

Bitcoin's "QE Lite" wave

Bitcoin punched through $72,000 this week on the back of a record short squeeze—traders who bet on lower prices being forced to buy back at higher ones, which pushes the price up even further—fueled by a U.S. Treasury plan to nearly double its long-bond buybacks starting September 9. Bitcoin is now trading above $77,000, with an intraday high of $79,000.

Traders have nicknamed the move "QE Lite," since buybacks work by retiring older, harder-to-trade long bonds and rolling the debt into newer issues—loosening the long end of the Treasury market in a way that echoes the old Federal Reserve stimulus playbook, even though it comes from a different part of government. Risk assets across the board caught the bid, and XRP caught it the hardest.

On the daily chart, XRP opened Friday at $1.2681, touched an intraday high of $1.4300, and was trading near $1.40 at the time of writing—a 10.52% gain on the candle alone. Real-time rankings put the broader 24-hour move at 14.21%, with a 40.06% gain over the past week. That makes XRP the single best performer among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap today, ahead of Bitcoin's 7.44% and Ethereum's 4.50%, and marks XRP's best week since the 2024 election rally—the post-election surge of late 2024, when the wider crypto market rallied on expectations of a friendlier regulatory stance in Washington.

Breaking the death cross ceiling

The XRP price chart had been trapped in a death cross for months. A death cross forms when the 50-day exponential moving average—a short-term price trend line—slips below the 200-day one, a classic signal traders read as momentum turning bearish. Since the pattern formed on XRP's chart, every bounce attempt stalled at or just below the cloud those two moving averages create.

Friday's candle did not simply tag that ceiling; it closed above it entirely—the first daily close above both EMAs since the cross formed.

That is not quite the same as the death cross reversing. The 50-day average still sits below the 200-day one, meaning the lines have not crossed back into what traders call a golden cross. However, price reclaiming the space above both averages is usually the first step—the move that has to happen before the averages themselves eventually follow.

Indicator readings

The Relative Strength Index (RSI), a momentum gauge from 0 to 100 that flags overbought conditions above 70, is at 83.5—deep overbought territory, meaning the move happened fast enough that a pause or pullback would not be surprising.

The Average Directional Index (ADX), which measures how strong a trend is regardless of direction, sits at 32.4, comfortably above the 25 level traders use to confirm a real trend, with the buy-side directional line reading above the sell-side one. The Squeeze Momentum Indicator, which flags volatility compression before a breakout, has flipped to "off," meaning the squeeze has already fired and momentum is rising.

The movement is not happening in a vacuum. XRP's rally is riding Bitcoin's short squeeze, while the same Treasury liquidity news lifted a $275 million Ripple bond sale and new SEC crypto exemption rules are also in the mix. That policy angle is familiar ground for XRP: the SEC sued Ripple in 2020 over whether the token was an unregistered security, and a 2023 federal court ruling that XRP's programmatic sales on exchanges were not securities offerings still anchors much of the token's U.S. regulatory story. Bitcoin itself has still not closed above its own death cross lines, meaning XRP is currently out ahead of the coin it usually follows.

Levels in focus

Resistance sits at $1.43, Friday's high, then $1.60 near the top of the descending channel that has capped XRP since late 2025. Support sits at $1.34, then the golden zone between $1.0754 and $1.0965, with $0.9862 as the deeper floor.

The next scheduled tests come September 9, when the Treasury's bigger bond buybacks begin, and September 15, when the Senate is scheduled to revisit the Clarity Act—the House-passed market-structure bill that would divide oversight of digital assets between the SEC and the CFTC.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.