Why does a token that’s spent the last seven months yawning in a sideways channel suddenly have Twitter prophets screaming about $25 price targets? I’ve been digging through charts, lawsuits, and late-night Discord rants, and the picture is messier—and a lot more interesting—than the flashy price calls suggest.
The $5 siren song—too good, too soon?
Let’s start with the headline claim that XRP is on the verge of smashing its old 2018 all-time high and tagging $5 before New Year’s Eve. That bold prediction comes from the pseudonymous analyst who answers to XForce. If you haunt crypto Twitter, you’ve seen his lurid multi-color Elliott Wave charts. His current roadmap is simple on the surface:
- Wave 1: the grudging grind from last October’s $0.42 bottom to April’s $2.24 local top.
- Wave 2: the frustrating retrace—think plateaus around $1.90 and $2.01—that’s kept most of us in stasis all spring.
- Wave 3: the promised land. According to his fib extensions, this impulsive blast carries us to $5—maybe even $13 if momentum gets frothy.
- Wave 4: a reflex gut-check back to roughly $5.
- Wave 5: a climactic melt-up to $25 by mid-2025.
Simple, right? Except Elliott Wave theory is part science, part astrology, and part Rorschach test. Five different analysts can label the same price series five different ways. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a self-styled waves savant delete posts after price action nuked their count. That said, even skeptics admit XRP’s current structure—higher lows since the SEC settlement, repeated taps on the $2.25 ceiling—does look like a coiled spring.
Picking apart the chart—what’s real, what’s hopium?
I fired up TradingView and overlaid XForce’s count on a weekly Heikin-Ashi chart. Two things jumped out:
- Volume is dying. Each successive rally into the $2 handle has attracted roughly 30‒40% less volume than the previous one. That’s classic consolidation, but it also means fewer willing buyers if a breakout does happen. Spot liquidity can dry up fast in the holiday lull.
- RSI is flatlining at 52. In 2017’s mega-run, weekly RSI pivoted from 40 to 90 in three months. Right now RSI can’t even crack 65. Either the real thrust hasn’t started, or this entire formation is an exhaustion pattern.
So yes, a textbook Wave 3 extension could absolutely catapult a low-float coin like XRP past $5. But the market will need a catalyst bigger than recycled lawsuit rumors. That brings me to my next rabbit hole.
Is Ripple’s legal drama really "priced in"?
Ever since Judge Torres slapped the SEC with that partial defeat in July 2023—declaring XRP non-securities when sold on exchanges—XRP bulls have insisted the worst is over. But the case isn’t finished. The SEC still wants civil penalties north of $1.9 billion, and the final remedies briefing is scheduled for June 13, 2024. If the judge comes back with a nine-digit fine, that doesn’t kill Ripple, but it guts their war chest. Could that spook sidelined institutions? Absolutely.
I reached out to a former SEC enforcement attorney (he asked to stay off the record—compliance paranoia is real). His take: "The retail half-victory last summer was huge, but the optics of a billion-dollar penalty could still hang over the token for months. Don’t underestimate the chilling effect on U.S. exchanges looking to relist XRP at scale." Translation: Coinbase’s tiny XRP order book might stay tiny a lot longer than bag-holders hope.
Liquidity, leverage, and the shadow casino we ignore at our peril
If there’s one chart I can’t stop staring at, it’s XRP’s perpetual funding rate on Binance and Bybit. From February through early May, funding rarely budged above +0.01%. That’s a polite way of saying: no one’s aping with size. But in the last ten days, funding printed +0.06%, even spiking to +0.12% for a single four-hour candle. That tells me degens are quietly levering long ahead of the SEC milestone—and ahead of the mythical Wave 3.
Why does that matter? Because highly levered longs create tinder. If price stutters at $2.25 again, cascading liquidations kick in and suddenly we’re testing CasiTrades’ "momentum zone" at $1.55. She wasn’t kidding about "one final sharp drop to support." The math supports it: a 25% wick is all it takes to wipe 20x longs chasing a breakout.
The double-digit dream: is $13 actually on the table?
Look, I’m not immune to day-dreaming. I was around in January 2018 when XRP rocketed to $3.84 within twelve days—no ETFs, no Coinbase, no real DeFi. If that mania could happen then, why not $13 in today’s environment of constant Twitter hype and Robinhood onboarding?
Two cold-water stats:
- Circulating supply has ballooned from 38 billion in 2018 to nearly 55 billion today. Each extra billion tokens is a brick on the price balloon.
- For XRP to tag $13, market cap must crack $715 billion. That’s larger than NVIDIA after its AI blow-off. Could it happen? Sure. But Bitcoin would likely be sprinting north of $150k in that scenario, dragging every alt higher.
So yes, $13 is mathematically possible, but it requires a macro bull cycle so vicious that every alt gets a face-melting repricing. If you believe BTC will triple from here over the next year, then XRP at $13 isn’t insane. If you don’t, dial your expectations back to $4-$5 and savor the gain.
Behind-the-scenes wallet moves—coincidence or telegraph?
Here’s where the story gets spicy. On May 28, Whale Alert flagged two transfers totaling 425 million XRP—about $918 million—moving from Ripple-controlled escrow wallets to an unknown destination. History tells us Ripple periodically unlocks tokens for operational expenses, then re-locks what they don’t need. But for analysts tracking wallets (shout-out to the XRPLedger explorers), the timing raised eyebrows. Why release that much liquidity right as funding ramps and Wave 3 chatter peaks?
The conspiratorial corner of Telegram thinks Ripple knows a face-melter is coming and wants ammo to sell into strength. A more sober explanation: quarterly payroll and On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) partner payouts. Personally, I lean 70/30 in favor of the mundane explanation—but I can’t prove it. Without Ripple producing a public disbursal statement, we’re all speculating.
What could actually flip the $2.25 brick wall?
Prediction time feels cheap unless we back it with catalysts. Here are three tangible events that could light the fuse:
1. A clean SEC settlement—no nine-digit fine.
2. Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken adding U.S. trading pairs with full routing to their mobile apps.
3. RippleNet landing a household-name bank in Europe or the U.S., proving real-world adoption beyond remittance corridors.
Any one of those could goose spot demand enough for Wave 3 to become self-fulfilling prophecy. Absent them, I’d watch the BTC dominance chart instead; an alt season rotation is historically what drags XRP out of hibernation.
Why I’m cautiously long—but hedged
I opened a modest spot position at $1.92 last month—nothing that keeps me up at night. But I paired it with a 25% size short via Deribit June $1.45 puts, essentially buying downside insurance. If Wave 3 ignites, my upside isn’t capped. If the "sharp drop" scenario plays out, the puts cushion the fall and I reload lower. To me, that’s the only sane way to navigate a chart that looks ready to break—in either direction.
Data-driven conclusion—my 90-day roadmap
So here’s my line in the sand. If XRP closes a weekly candle above $2.60 with volume above 5 billion tokens traded, Wave 3 is probably real, and I’ll look for a measured move to $4.80-$5.20 into Q3. If instead we lose $1.75 on a weekly close, the bullish count is toast, and sub-$1.50 sweeps become my base case.
Either way, I’m done listening to blind hopium. The chart, the order books, and the legal docket will give us clearer signals than any Twitter influencer’s neon arrows. Stay nimble. Question every narrative—including this one.
