Crypto is having one of its best weeks in months, and XRP just grabbed the wheel.
Bitcoin punched through $72,000 this week on the back of a record short squeeze—traders who bet on lower prices getting 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. Today Bitcon is trading above $77,000 with an intraday high of $79,000.
Traders have nicknamed the move "QE Lite," since loosening bond markets this way echoes the old Federal Reserve stimulus playbook even though it's coming from a different part of government. Risk assets across the board caught the bid. XRP caught it the hardest.
On the daily chart, XRP opened Friday at $1.2681, tapped an intraday high of $1.4300, and is trading near $1.40 as of this writing—a 10.52% gain on the candle alone.
Real-time rankings put the broader 24-hour move even higher, at 14.21%, with a 40.06% gain over the past week. That makes XRP the single best-performing asset among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap today, ahead of Bitcoin's 7.44% and Ethereum's 4.50%.
The XRP price chart had been trapped in a death cross for months, which is as bad as it sounds. A death cross is the pattern that forms when the 50-day exponential moving average, a short-term price trend line, slips below the 200-day one. It’s a classic signal traders read as momentum turning bearish. Since its formation on the XRP chart, every bounce attempt has stalled either right at or just below the cloud; those two moving averages form on the chart.
Today's candle didn't just tag that ceiling. It closed above it entirely, the first daily close above both EMAs since the cross formed.
But that's not quite the same as the death cross reversing. The 50-day average is still sitting below the 200-day one—the lines themselves haven't crossed back into what traders call a golden cross. But price reclaiming the space above both averages is usually the first domino, the move that has to happen before the averages themselves eventually follow.
The rest of the indicator panel backs up the breakout read. The Relative Strength Index, or 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 wouldn't be surprising.
The Average Directional Index, or 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 already fired, and momentum is rising.
The movement isn’t happening in a vacuum. XRP's best week since the 2024 election pump is riding Bitcoin's short squeeze, and the same Treasury liquidity news lifted a $275 million Ripple bond sale and new SEC crypto exemption rules are in the mix.
But Bitcoin itself still hasn't closed above its own death cross lines, meaning XRP is currently out ahead of the coin it usually follows.
Key levels to watch: Resistance sits at $1.43 (today's high), then $1.60 near the top of the descending channel that's 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 real 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.
