XRP at a Crossroads as Senate Punts on Clarity Act

The Senate left town without taking up the Clarity Act, pushing the market-structure vote to at least September. Every major coin shrugged it off—except XRP.

While Bitcoin stayed flat, dealing with its own headwinds, and Dogecoin gained 1.38% over the day to be the best performer in the top 10 crypto assets by market cap, XRP dropped 2.05%, the only major token to close red.

On a week that saw it fall 3%, it’s the weakest of the majors by a wide margin.

The delay isn’t just procedural for XRP. The token’s entire 2025–2026 rally thesis rested on the U.S. finally deciding what XRP is. The Clarity Act would sort crypto into securities and commodities and, in drafts Decrypt previously reported, would reclassify XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin as non-securities.

That means these coins would fall under the regulatory purview of the CFTC, widely viewed as the more preferable option by crypto industry observers, rather than the historically tougher SEC.

For Ripple, whose co-founder created the XRP cryptocurrency, that’s the prize years of litigation were about: a federal answer to the SEC’s long fight over whether XRP was an unregistered security. Ripple agreed to pay $50 million to settle its cross-appeal with the SEC, but a statute beats a settlement.

A law settles the question for every exchange, custodian, and regulator at once. Without it, XRP stays in legal limbo—and limbo is what the chart appears to be pricing.

XRP price: What the charts say

XRP is trading at $1.028, roughly a $64 billion market cap, down 0.71% on the day, after a red candle that has kept it pinned just above the $1.00 psychological floor. It’s the second-lowest print on the daily chart since early 2024, above only the $0.9153 low marked last month.

The trajectory is a clean, grinding downtrend. XRP has been in a strong bearish trend since 2025, when it reached $3 per coin. The 50-day EMA (the average price over the last 50 sessions) has crossed below the 200-day EMA (the average over the last 200 sessions) in a formation known as a death cross. XRP’s current price is below both lines, so there’s no average acting as support beneath it.

The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, reads 35.9. RSI is a momentum gauge on a 0–100 scale: above 70 is overbought, below 30 is oversold. At 35.9, momentum is bearish with room for more downside before buyers typically step in.

The Average Directional Index, or ADX, reads 11.9. ADX measures trend strength, not direction: below 20 means the move lacks conviction and chop is common. However, the Squeeze Momentum indicator is still off, meaning volatility is expanding rather than coiling.

No compression means no loaded spring waiting to fire; moves here tend to be slow.

A bull case would appear if a daily close back above $1.10 (the lower Fib zone and first real resistance) and then the $1.13 point of control signal the floor is holding. An advance in the Clarity Act, though not until September at the earliest now, could also ignite some bullish appetite among traders.

Bear case: a break under $1.00 opens the path to $0.9153, the chart’s lowest mark since 2024. A daily close there confirms the downtrend and erases the post-2024 recovery. The current trend is bearish, so this is a very likely scenario.

On Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, traders are currently optimistic on XRP’s short-term outlook. Traders are pricing in 77% odds that XRP stays above $1.00, at least over the weekend.

For now, $1.00 is the line. Above it, XRP is cheap and oversold; below it, the chart says the slide isn’t done.