XRP futures bets hit highest since October, setting up a spicy CPI print

Open interest in XRP futures now sits at 2.67 billion XRP, worth about $2.73 billion. That’s the highest since October, up from 2.25 billion XRP at the start of the month. And it’s piling up while the token trades within pennies of a level traders have been watching for weeks.

That level is $1.

Prices dipped briefly to 99 cents on some exchanges Tuesday. They recovered fast, but the bounce looked to have stalled near $1.02. XRP has lagged behind bitcoin and the broader market recovery in recent days, which is not the position you want to be in heading into a macro print.

Leverage plus a round number is a bad combination

Stacking leverage on a token sitting on a psychological floor is how you get a violent move in either direction. The buildup points to potential volatility, and it makes XRP more vulnerable than bitcoin, ether or solana to the U.S. CPI release later today.

Bitcoin was trading at $64,185.98 and ether at $1,912.21. Neither is carrying the same kind of positioning risk into the number.

Wednesday hasn’t been kind to XRP on other fronts either. A bridge linking to the XRP Ledger was exploited early in the day, which is the sort of headline that tends to find a price already looking fragile.

What the forecasts actually say

Headline CPI for July is expected to show 0.1% month-on-month growth, up from June’s –0.4% reading. Year-on-year is seen at 3.4%, down from 3.5%. Annual core CPI inflation is expected to drop to 2.5% from 2.6%.

A hotter-than-forecast reading would strengthen bets on Fed interest-rate increases and push already-buoyant Treasury yields higher. That’s a headwind for risk assets generally, and for a leveraged, lagging token specifically.

ING said a softer-than-expected print could weaken the dollar, an outcome that could bode well for the crypto market.

The options market isn’t betting on much

Bitcoin traders are hoping the report finally shoves the price out of its recent $62,000 to $66,000 range. The options market disagrees.

Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, said the market is pricing a post-CPI swing of just 1.3%, which is nothing out of the ordinary.

Data tracking website Laevitas saw the same thing. “7d ATM IV [implied volatility] has compressed to 29.1v on BTC and 41.2v on ETH even as a binary July print lands inside the weekly window, so the term structure is declining to price the event risk that sits directly on the tape,” Laevitas said on X.

Translated: the market is charging less for protection right before an event that could obviously move things. That’s the setup where a big beat or miss catches people leaning the wrong way.

Where XRP breaks if $1 goes

Look at the weekly candles since 2023 and the shape of this is clear enough. XRP peaked above $3.50 in July last year and has been declining ever since.

A drop under $1 would be the first since November 2024, when Donald Trump won the presidential election. That’s a long time for a level to hold, which is precisely why breaking it matters.

Below that, the July 2023 high of 92 cents, where buyers ran out of steam, could act as support on the way lower. If 92 cents gives way, the next potential support sits around 50 cents.

Elsewhere: Zcash puts its upgrade on the line

Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security and governance can hold.

That last part is the interesting bit. Plenty of upgrades promise throughput. Fewer are framed as a stress test of whether the project’s own funding and governance structures survive contact with the work.

What to watch

If you hold XRP, the number that matters isn’t the CPI print itself. It’s whether $1 holds in the hour after it lands, with 2.67 billion XRP of open interest sitting behind the move.

Low expectations are priced in across BTC and ETH options. Stay alert.