XRP Sinks to One-Year Low as Altcoins Fall Harder Than Bitcoin

XRP fell to about $0.902 at 5:48 p.m. ET on Saturday, down 10.6% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko. That is the lowest daily reading in CoinGecko's XRP data for the past year, and about 22% below the $1.16 it fetched on Nov. 8.

The rest of the market slid with it. The total value of all crypto fell about 9% in a day to roughly $2.18 trillion, CoinGecko data shows.

Black Mint reported at noon that bitcoin had hit its lowest level since August, near $65,380. By evening it was lower still.

Smaller coins took the bigger hits

Prices at 5:48 p.m. ET and 24-hour changes, per CoinGecko:

• Bitcoin: about $63,760, down 6.7%, its lowest daily reading since Aug. 17
• Ether: about $1,758, down 8.8%, its lowest since July 10
• Solana: about $69.48, down 11.2%
• Cardano: about $0.1456, down 13.1%
• Uniswap's UNI: about $4.75, down 17.2%

How forced selling feeds a slide

Many traders hold crypto futures bought partly with borrowed money, which is called leverage. If prices fall far enough that a trader's deposit no longer covers the loss, the exchange closes the position and sells, a step called liquidation. Those sales can push prices down to the next group of trigger points.

An Investing.com report carried by Yahoo Finance tied Saturday's losses to forced liquidations, a week of outflows from U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs and a broader pullback from tech and AI stocks. It said bitcoin was headed for a sixth straight weekly loss and was down more than 20% since Oct. 21.

The Crypto Times said XRP's drop appeared to come from market-wide pressure rather than news about XRP itself.

In our opinion: the detail worth noticing is the order of the damage. Bitcoin fell 6.7%, ether 8.8% and several large altcoins by double digits, which is how a market sheds risk from the edges inward. XRP has now given back about a fifth of its value in six days. The first real test of demand comes Monday, when the ETFs open again after a weekend of trading without them.