XRP would need to climb 321% over the 55 days remaining in 2026 to reach $5, after a 9% drop on Friday, November 6, took the token to $1.19. It is a demanding target by any historical measure.

A $5 price would stand 37% above XRP's all-time high of $3.66, set in July 2025, and would value the token's circulating supply at roughly $318 billion — more than four times the current $75.3 billion, a valuation that would place XRP among the largest crypto assets by market value.

History offers little encouragement at this point in the calendar. Across every year since 2018, XRP has risen more than 321% between November 6 and December 31 only once, in 2024. In the other seven years, its gains fell far short of that mark.

The more encouraging signal comes from large holders. The number of private wallets holding at least 1 million XRP — excluding wallets identified as belonging to exchanges or Ripple — rose from 1,657 to 1,764 over the past month. Together, these wallets added 1.37 billion XRP even as the price fell 18%, a pattern that suggests large buyers are using the decline to build positions. The accumulation spanned all three wallet-size tiers tracked in the analysis.

So can XRP reach $5 before 2027, and what would it take?

Ripple has meanwhile continued to expand its stablecoin footprint, as BSCN highlighted on November 6. RLUSD, the token in question, is Ripple's dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in late 2024, and net-new issuance — how much fresh supply an issuer mints over a given window — is a standard gauge of inflows into a stablecoin:

Ripple is beating much of the larger competition… @Ripple topped all other stablecoin issuers in the last 24 hours, issuing $34.7 million in net-new tokenized dollars in RLUSD. This made it outperform @Tether ($24.2 million) and @m0 ($22.6 million), @SoFi ($4.6 million),… pic.twitter.com/tn5cY0GU5V

— BSCN (@BSCNews) November 6, 2026

Has XRP Ever Rallied 321% Before the New Year?

Only once in eight years. For each year since 2018, 99Bitcoins compared XRP's closing price on November 6 on Binance with the highest price the token reached before December 31 — the maximum return available to a buyer entering on November 6 and holding through year-end:

• 2024: +437%, from $0.54 to $2.91 on December 3, during the post-election rally
• 2020: +202%, from $0.26 to $0.78
• 2021 and 2025: +17% each
• 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023: 5% or less

In most years, XRP actually lost ground. In six of the eight, it ended December 31 lower than it stood on November 6.

The odds look similarly slim at any point in the year. Examining every 55-day stretch since May 2018, measured from each day's close, XRP rose 321% or more in only 1.8% of them — all concentrated in two rallies, in early 2021 and late 2024. In a typical 55-day stretch, its best gain was 21%.

What Are XRP Whales, Volume and Traders Doing?

Whales are buying while the price falls. To measure this, the XRPScan list of today's 10,000 largest XRP accounts was compared with what those same accounts held on October 7, read directly from the XRP Ledger. Wallets XRPScan identifies as exchanges or Ripple, along with the Binance hacker's wallets, were excluded, so the count covers private holders only:

• Holders of 1 million+ XRP: 1,764, up 107 from 1,657 — a 6.5% increase
• Holders of 10 million+ XRP: 338, up 21 from 317
• Holders of 100 million+ XRP: 24, up two
• Total held by these private wallets: 21.13 billion XRP, up 1.37 billion — roughly $1.6 billion at today's price

Exchange wallets barely changed. Wallets XRPScan identifies as exchanges held 24.93 billion XRP, just 44 million less than a month earlier, meaning the freshly accumulated tokens sit outside trading venues rather than on exchange books.

Trading activity has thinned. Spot trading on Binance — purchases and sales of XRP itself — averaged $117 million per day over the past 30 days, less than half the $246 million recorded in the preceding 30 days. Spot volume tracks XRP changing hands directly, separate from leveraged derivatives activity.

Futures traders lean bullish. On OKX, 3.97 accounts were betting on a rise for every one betting on a fall as of Thursday. Open futures positions were worth $122 million, close to their level a month ago. Funding — the fee one side pays the other to keep positions open — held at the standard 0.01% every eight hours, so those bullish bets are not overheated.

Prediction markets are more skeptical. On Kalshi, a US-regulated platform where traders buy and sell contracts on real-world outcomes, a contract that pays $1 if XRP tops $2 at any point in 2026 costs 15 to 18 cents, implying traders see roughly a one-in-six chance. The equivalent bet on $5 barely trades: buyers offer 4 cents and sellers ask 13, a spread too wide to yield a clear price.

XRP Price Analysis: What Does the Weekly Chart Say?

On the weekly timeframe, XRP has considerable ground to recover. The token trades at $1.19, below its 20-week exponential moving average (EMA) at $1.32 and its 50-week EMA at $1.48 — moving averages widely used to judge whether a price is in an uptrend or a downtrend.

• Resistance: $1.32, the 20-week EMA, then $1.48, the 50-week EMA. Above those sit $1.70, the August 22 high, and $2.42, the 2026 high set on January 6.
• Support: $1.18, Friday's low, followed by $0.99, the August 14 low and XRP's lowest price of 2026.

For XRP to reach $5 by New Year's Eve, it would have to break through every one of those levels and then clear its $3.66 record. Large holders buying during the downturn is a constructive sign for a recovery — but only the 2024 rally has ever moved XRP that far, that fast, at this point in the year. Over the remaining 55 days, the measurable markers are whether the whale accumulation of the past month continues, whether Binance spot volume rebounds from its recent halving, and whether the price reclaims the 20-week EMA at $1.32.

This article originally appeared on 99Bitcoins.