XRP Drops 3% to $1.436: Longs Paid 89% of $31M, OI -5.1%

XRP Is the Odd One Out in This Flush

XRP fell 3% to $1.436 on Tuesday morning, and the liquidation data shows why it stands apart from BTC and ETH. In the last 24 hours, $31 million in XRP positions were wiped out, and 89% of that was on the long side. BTC's $256 million wipeout split 54/46 between longs and shorts; ETH's $160 million was close to even too. XRP did not get a balanced unwind. It got a one-way long flush.

The price path tells the same story. XRP tagged $1.551 in the last 24 hours, dropped to $1.403, and now sits at $1.436. That is a 9.5% round trip that left most of the damage on leveraged buyers who chased the move up.

One $3.18M Order Shows the Scale

The largest single XRP liquidation in the window was a $3.18 million long on Hyperliquid, wiped at $1.404. A handful of five and six figure longs on Binance filled out the list below it. When the biggest single hit is a long and the coin is still down 3% on the day, it usually means the crowd is still positioned the wrong way for the current tape.

Compare that with the August 24 bounce, when XRP steadied near $1.50 and open interest was rebuilding. That article framed a recovering setup. This one is the other side: the same longs that rebuilt then are paying for it now, and leverage is coming out rather than going in.

Open Interest Splits in Two Directions

XRP open interest sits at $2.25 billion, down 5.1% in 24 hours. But the decline is not uniform. Binance cut 6.9%, OKX cut 4.4%, and Bybit trimmed 1.1%. Gate went the other way, adding 3.2% of OI while the price fell. That split matters: the big venues are shedding leverage after the flush, while at least one venue has buyers willing to step in on the dip.

It also means the total OI picture understates how much de-risking happened on the largest exchanges. If you only looked at the aggregate, a 5.1% drop looks mild. The venue-level numbers show Binance alone took out nearly 7% of its XRP book.

Funding Says the Crowd Is Still Long

Perpetual funding on Binance and OKX is still positive at 0.01% on XRP, with Bybit slightly negative at -0.0012% and Hyperliquid near zero. Positive funding after a 9.5% swing means leveraged longs have not fully capitulated. In most flush cycles, the cleanest signal that the unwind is over is funding flipping negative or flat across venues. That has not happened yet.

The level to watch is the $1.40 low. A break below it risks another wave of stop-outs from longs still holding at 0.01% funding. On the upside, $1.55 is the obvious resistance. Until funding turns or OI stabilizes, the path of least resistance for XRP remains down toward the low, and the Gate buildup looks more like dip-buying than institutional accumulation.

Data as of 05:47 Beijing time on August 26, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit, Hyperliquid, Gate, Bitget and other major exchanges.