Is XRP a lost cause? That’s the question being asked across cryptocurrency communities right now, and it’s one that doesn’t have an easy answer. With the digital asset facing mounting pressure from panic selling and also significant holder losses, the situation has become increasingly concerning. XRP price prediction 2026 estimates are all over the map these days, ranging from deeply bearish to cautiously optimistic, and many are asking why XRP never goes up anymore. The token’s brutal 60% decline from its peak has left investors wondering if this is just a temporary setback or if XRP is a lost cause for good.
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XRP Price Prediction 2026 Amid Panic Selling And Major Losses
The numbers that have come out lately tell a story that’s hard to ignore. Data from Glassnode shows that XRP’s Spent Output Profit Ratio, or SOPR for short, has fallen pretty dramatically—it dropped from 1.16 back in July 2025 all the way down to 0.96 at the time of writing. What this means is that holders are realizing major losses, and it’s not just a few people here and there. The blockchain analytics firm highlighted what they called “triggered panic selling” as investors offload XRP in response to broader market pressures that have built up over recent months.
Right now, the token trades around the $1.41 to $1.43 range, which represents a massive drop from its cycle high of $3.66. When you’re looking at whether XRP is a lost cause or not at the time of writing, traders can’t ignore these kinds of price movements, and they’ve weighed heavily on investor sentiment right now.
David Schwartz, who serves as Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, recently addressed all the speculation that’s going around about XRP reaching extreme price targets. His comments were measured, and also pretty revealing about how he thinks about these things:
“I don’t feel comfortable saying something like that. While I don’t think it’s likely, I didn’t think it was likely that XRP would ever hit $0.25. I started selling XRP at $0.10 because it seemed insane. I remember when bitcoin hitting $100 seemed like an impossible dream.”
But Schwartz also explained why the current prices suggest that investors aren’t really convinced of those higher targets that keep getting thrown around on social media:
“If many rational people believed that there was a 10% chance that XRP hit $100 within a few years, they definitely wouldn’t sell very much today at much less than $10.”
Long-Term Holders Exit At Massive Losses
The panic selling that’s happened isn’t just random noise, either. Long-term holders—the ones who accumulated their positions before November 2024—increased their spending by a staggering 580%. We’re talking about a jump from $38 million per day to $260 million per day since August 2025. This XRP panic selling happened into weakness, not into strength, which is a critical distinction. Experienced traders exited their positions as the price kept collapsing, and the 30-day moving average of daily realized losses surged to $75 million. Since the beginning of the year, investors realized somewhere between $500 million and $1.2 billion in losses every single week.
Despite what looks like a pretty grim picture, analysts are insisting that asking if XRP is a lost cause might be the wrong question entirely. Geoffrey Kendrick, who’s the global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, still maintains an XRP price prediction 2026 target of $8. He argues that regulatory clarity and also ETF inflows provide what he calls “a catalyst for adoption.” But here’s the thing—this optimistic forecast hasn’t prevented the current wave of panic selling, and critics are definitely questioning why did XRP fail to capitalize on these supposedly positive developments.
The question of why XRP never goes up despite seemingly good news is one that keeps coming up in discussions. Some point to the fact that meager ETF inflows, which have averaged only about $1.2 million on recent trading days, haven’t provided the boost that many anticipated when spot XRP ETFs launched back in late 2025. Others are looking at the fact that XRP has significantly underperformed both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the past six months, which has led some investors to rotate their capital into what they see as faster-growing opportunities.
Strong Fundamentals Meet Weak Price Action
The reality behind the issue of whether XRP is a lost cause or not is far likely to be between the worst-case scenarios (doom and gloom) and the moon-shot expectations. The basics of XRP have in fact become more solid in certain crucial aspects-the SEC settlement of August 2025 was a watershed and it should have been game changers the spot ETF approvals.
In February 2026, Ripple RLUSD stablecoin had a market cap of 1.5 billion and Binance more recently added it to enable it to assist with liquidity. Large companies such as Evernorth and Trident Digital Tech have begun using XRP to settle international transactions.
But the question is why did XRP not turn these developments into long-term price appreciation right now? The on-chain data could be part of the solution. By mid-November, the portion of XRP supply in profits had gone down to only 58.5%—the lowest in 2024 since the asset traded at only $0.53 at the time of writing. Although XRP traded at a value of about 2.15 at the time, which represented four times the November 2024 price, the combined value of the coin showed a loss of over 41 percent of the total supply.
So Is XRP a Lost Cause?
The information indicates that it is not as easy as yes or no. Underlying pillars are perhaps more robust than it was in the 2022 downturn where regulatory clarity was not present at all. Whether XRP will never rally once more or whether this phase of capitulation is similar to what occurred during the 2021 to 2022 September-May period where more than two years of consistent consolidation finally resulted in stabilization is the billion-dollar question to investors making huge losses here in February 2026.
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The clue could lie in the time horizons right now, and also understanding the risk tolerance to determine whether XRP represents a lost cause or the opportunity itself at the time of writing. There is obviously a problem with short-term traders as to why XRP never increases even with good news, and longer-term holders are hoping that the present suffering is just capitulation and also an ultimate increase.