XRP Holders Still Underwater After 9 Years While $BTC Sails 314% Past Its Peak 🏊

XRP traded around $1.33 on Thursday, sitting roughly 62.5% below the $3.55 mark it set in early January 2018, leaving buyers from that peak underwater nearly nine years later despite the token briefly topping its old high by reaching $3.66 in July 2025 before falling back. Bitcoin BTC $82,071.33, in contrast, is up 314% from its December 2017 peak of $19,804, ether ETH $2,451.53 is up 66% from its prior high, dogecoin DOGE $0.08212 is up 322% from its January 2018 peak, BNB BNB $729.88 is up about 2,800%, and zcash (ZEC) is up 38%, while tron (TRX) remains slightly below its peak, down about 4%. Solana launched in 2020. Bitcoin, ether and many of these tokens have pulled back sharply from their 2025 highs and still trade well above their 2017 peaks.

Analysts point to a sharp expansion in XRP's circulating supply as a primary drag on its price performance. "Circulating supply grew 63%, from 38.7B in 2017 to 63.1B, while XRP's total market value fell only about 3%," Nicolai Sondergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, told CoinDesk. "More XRP in circulation means each token represents a smaller share of roughly the same total value." Oliver Carding, head of marketing at Tesseract Group, said XRP's standing looks different when measured by total value rather than price. "On value, XRP recovered," he said. "About 63% more XRP is in circulation than at that peak, so the same circulating market capitalization would mean a price roughly 39% lower."

Market data also show muted demand for the token. XRP's exchange-traded products have attracted far less capital than those tied to bitcoin and ether, trading activity has thinned relative to the 2017 cycle, and on-chain metrics indicate declining network usage on the XRP Ledger, the blockchain native to the asset.

Structural factors have compounded the price lag. Ripple, the company closely associated with XRP, has focused on payments use cases rather than the decentralized finance, non-fungible token and meme-coin narratives that propelled other tokens, leaving XRP with limited exposure to those sectors. Years of regulatory uncertainty stemming from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Ripple, first filed in December 2020, have further weighed on sentiment around the token, which remains the world's fifth-largest digital asset by market capitalization.