XRP has surged 51% to $1.50 since Monday, its best weekly performance since November 2024, after a Treasury bond buyback stoked hopes of yield curve control. But the rally is built on heavy leverage, leaving $24 million in long positions exposed to a reversal.
XRP has surged 51% to $1.50 since Monday, putting it on track for its best weekly performance since November 2024. The token has outpaced bitcoin, ether, and Solana by a wide margin this week: bitcoin gained 22% and ether rose 30%, while Solana rallied 28%.
Treasury buyback sparks curve control bets
The rally began after the U.S. Treasury said it will buy back $4 billion or more of its long-duration bonds on multiple occasions between Sept. 9 and Nov. 4, doubling the previous $2 billion cap. Yields on longer-duration bonds had hit their highest levels since 2007 earlier in the week, and the buyback's timing suggested an attempt to cap that rise.
As a result, the announcement fed speculation that policymakers could eventually turn to full-blown yield curve control, a stimulus tool in which a central bank caps longer-duration bond yields and buys as many bonds as needed to hold that ceiling. Both the Bank of Japan and the U.S. have used the tool before.
Short sellers get squeezed
The price rise has cleared out a large chunk of bearish bets. Shorts worth nearly $2 billion have been liquidated this week, according to Coinglass. Still, the move marks just a 20% recovery of XRP's slide from its record high of $3.65 last July to just under $1 a week ago.
Hidden imbalance leaves longs exposed
Beneath the stable price above $1.50, data from CoinGlass and Bitfinex shows the buying is fueled by margin capital. On Bitfinex, XRP margin longs have climbed to 6.41 billion coins, with more than 260 million XRP added during the latest candle alone. On Binance, the number of leveraged buyers is now more than two and a half times higher than sellers, and daily futures volume is running about 4.5 times higher than spot turnover.
That skew has created a 723% imbalance between the two sides. While short sellers risk losing only $2.95 million, a $24.29 million cluster of long positions faces forced liquidation if the price reverses — 7.2 times the exposure on the short side. Nearly $29 million in positions have already been force-closed over the past 24 hours, most of them longs, and a large spot sale could trigger a cascade of margin calls that pushes the price back toward the $1 level.
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