XRP Loses Leverage on Binance as Selling Pressure Builds

Something quite curious is happening around XRP. On Binance, a good part of the leverage accumulated in recent weeks disappears. In cash, however, sellers continue to press. And at the same time, UNI, NEAR or HYPE suddenly gain height. The crypto market thus offers two almost opposite images. Data published by Amr Taha at CryptoQuant allows us to better understand the first: on XRP, traders cut their positions much faster than the price falls.

On Binance, leverage leaves XRP at high speed

Let’s start with the numbers from CryptoQuant. On August 22, XRP’s open interest on Binance was around $323 million. On September 17, only 219 million remained. Nearly a third gone in less than four weeks.

The price lost around 11% over the period.

This gap deserves more attention than the decline alone. Open interest adds up the derivative positions still open: when it decreases, more positions disappear than are created. However, a small rebound took place at the beginning of September. On the 6th, the indicator had risen to around $244 million. He didn’t last.

And the spot tells an even less comfortable story. The estimated CVD on centralized exchanges increased from -111 million to -2.1 billion dollars. This indicator measures, schematically, who hits the market the hardest: buyers or sellers. Here, they are clearly the latter.

On Binance perpetuals, the CVD went from -361 million to -1 billion. The deterioration of the spot is therefore approaching 2 billion, compared to 639 million for the perps.

The signal is clear: XRP traders are reducing their exposure to derivatives while aggressive selling remains high on both futures and spot.

Amr Taha, CryptoQuant

There remains a paradox: cleaning up so much leverage can also make the market less vulnerable to cascades of long liquidations. CryptoQuant reminds us of this. Bad photo today, then; not necessarily a bad movie tomorrow.

Among altcoins, everything goes up… but not for the same reasons

On September 18, the scene had frankly changed elsewhere. The total market capitalization gained around 2.2% over twenty-four hours to reach $2.66 trillion. FxPro did not note any decline among its selection of the forty most liquid cryptos.

And big performances did not come from heavyweights.

Depending on the time of reading, Uniswap gained between 26% and 31%, NEAR between 26% and 30%. Hyperliquid approached 14% at Trending Topics, Zcash exceeded 10%. Bitcoin was growing much slower. Its dominance had even fallen below 59%, a one-month low.

But putting all these increases in the same bag would be misleading.

UNI benefits from the American regulatory opening around the trading of tokenized shares on certain authorized pools, an area in which Uniswap v4 had already positioned itself. Hyperliquid is taking advantage of another story: Kraken wants to offer on-chain perpetuals in the United States via Bitnomial, subject to the regulatory green light. Zcash received support from Paradigm while its community approved changing blocks from 75 to 25 seconds.

So there is rotation, yes. A tide that lifts all altcoins, much less. Even the Altcoin Season Index remains far from the level traditionally associated with a true altseason.

The old altseason has especially lost its monopoly on speculation

This is perhaps where the 2026 market differs most from previous cycles.

In the past, the path of money seemed almost marked out. Bitcoin increased in value, part of the gains went to large altcoins, then the appetite for risk pushed capital down the rankings. This highway now has many more exits.

The figures gathered by FXStreet measure the change. Between October 2025 and June 2026, the capitalization of altcoins plunged from $1.49 trillion to $543 billion. At the same time, RWAs have built their own market.

Since January 2025, their on-chain AUM has increased from approximately $4 billion to $34.092 billion. The open interest of perpetuals linked to RWA now exceeds 15.9 billion. In August alone, these products generated $948.234 billion.

And they are not the only ones who look the other way.

Prediction markets have accumulated $120.23 billion in volume since January. Launchpads have multiplied the tokens available to the point of absurdity: Pump.fun represented 12.9 million of the 32 million tokens present on Solana in October 2025.

This is above all what an investor can take away from this change: counting the altcoins that are rising is no longer enough. We need to look at where the volumes are really circulating, where the open interest is growing and which platforms are collecting the revenue.

Hyperliquid has generated over $429 million in revenue since January. This figure probably says more about the new geography of speculation than a simple index labeled “altseason”.

XRP’s golden cross arrives with a rather strange CV

Back to XRP, and this time to the charts.

Its 50-day moving average is about 2% off the 200-day average. If the first crosses the second, XRP will print a golden crossa figure that technical analysts readily associate with the establishment of an uptrend.

The only thing is: XRP already knows this signal very well.

CoinDesk found sixteen golden crosses in its history. None lasted twelve months. They all ended up giving way to a death cross.

This assessment could be enough to throw the indicator in the trash. That would be going a bit quickly. Of the ten golden crosses who lived long enough to observe their performance three months later, five produced gains of between 85% and more than 1,000%. That of April 2017 was followed by an increase of 1,009.6%. February 2021 gave +135%.

Not really useless. Not really reliable either.

Altcoins have accelerated sharply while major cryptos continue to lag behind.

Alex Kuptsikevich, FxPro, quoted by CoinDesk

This is precisely why the next intersection deserves to be read with the other data. XRP arrives with an open interest cut by 32%, a very negative Spot CVD and a market which is starting to look elsewhere than Bitcoin.

The golden cross will give a graphic signal. The feeds will tell if he has legs.

Five numbers to keep an eye on XRP

• The price of XRP is trading at $1.38 at the time of writing, in a market where the recent decline in leverage significantly exceeds that in price.
• Open interest on Binance reached around $219 million, up from $323 million on August 22, a contraction of nearly 32%.
• The estimated Spot CVD reaches -$2.1 billion, after losing another around $700 million since September 6.
• The 50-day moving average is moving about 2% below the 200-day moving average, leaving the golden cross close but not yet confirmed.
• Bitcoin’s dominance has fallen below 59%, while several altcoins have just recorded double-digit daily gains.

The next few months will bring winners, latecomers and probably a few buyers arriving at the station when the train has already left the platform. Tom Lee sees an exceptional year ahead for cryptos, with tokenization among the big drivers he is monitoring. There remains a difficulty as old as the markets: being exposed in the right place. XRP has its signals. Capital owes him no loyalty.