XRP — the cryptocurrency native to the payments-focused XRP Ledger and closely associated with fintech firm Ripple — hovered near $1 on Monday as derivatives traders piled into leveraged bets on a recovery, even as social-media commentary about the token turned the most bearish it has been in three months.

Futures open interest — the money tied up in outstanding derivatives positions — rose to about $2.78 billion on Monday, up 2% over 24 hours, while trading volume jumped 55% to roughly $1.17 billion, according to CoinGlass.

Heavy Long Skew on Binance and OKX

The positioning is heavily skewed toward bets on a price rise. More than three accounts on Binance held long XRP positions for every one holding a short, and the ratio among the exchange's largest traders stood at about 3.6 to one. OKX showed the same 3.6-to-one split. Both exchanges rank among the largest crypto futures venues, and their top-trader ratios are widely followed as a window into how bigger accounts are positioned.

A long position is a bet that the price will rise. Leverage lets a trader make a larger bet than their money would otherwise buy, at the cost of being automatically forced out of the position if the market moves far enough against them.

Measured in tokens, the scale of the positioning comes into sharper focus. About 2.77 billion XRP now sits in futures positions, up from closer to 2 billion earlier this summer and nearing the levels last seen when the token was worth several times more. CoinGlass data show the long-to-short ratio across all venues at about 0.93 over 24 hours, indicating that market-wide positioning is close to balanced — the heavy long bias is concentrated on Binance, OKX and among their bigger accounts.

Sentiment Sours as Network Activity Picks Up

Sentiment has moved in the opposite direction. Commentary about XRP across X, Reddit, Telegram and other channels reached its most negative level in three months this week, onchain analysis firm Santiment said, after the token failed to rally. XRP trades around $1, down from above $3 at last year's highs.

The XRP Ledger is getting busier, too. Nearly 50,000 addresses were active over a 24-hour stretch — the most in more than two months, per Santiment — after activity slid toward its 2026 lows in July. An active address is a wallet that sent or received anything during the period; the metric shows more wallets are using the ledger, but not whether the people behind them are buying, selling or shuffling tokens between their own accounts.

The $1 Level to Watch

Analysts warn that a break below $1 could trigger forced selling. Leveraged longs that run out of collateral get closed by the exchange, which can mean selling into the market. Round numbers such as $1 often act as psychological reference points for traders, one reason a break below them draws attention.

Beyond the price itself, the gauges that will show how the story develops are the ones already in motion: open interest, which rises as new leveraged bets are added and falls as positions are unwound, and active addresses, which will indicate whether the ledger's pickup in usage holds.

XRP traded around $1 in the Asian morning hours on Monday, with bitcoin topping $64,000.

Source: CoinDesk