Just looked back at what happened to XRP in February and man, it was brutal. The current XRP price USD had crashed to $1.11 during that month before bouncing back a bit, down 30% in just four weeks. Started the year around $1.38 and honestly, the whole thing was a perfect storm.

First thing that killed it was Bitcoin just tanking — when BTC drops 8%, XRP historically gets hit 15% harder because of the correlation. Bitcoin was sitting around $68k and everyone was terrified of it breaking below $60k. Once that happened, everything else followed. Then you had the liquidation cascade on that Black Sunday weekend (Feb 1-2) when $2.2 billion in leveraged positions got force-closed. That alone triggered another 10% drop in XRP as stop losses cascaded down.

What really surprised traders was that the XRP ETF inflows that had been holding things up in January just... stopped. Like, they went from $48M flowing in during a single two-day spike in January to basically crickets by late February. The institutional bid that was supposed to be a floor just disappeared. Meanwhile, the technical picture looked terrible — broke below the $1.60 support that had been holding since April 2025, and that opened up a clear air pocket down to the $1.00 level.

Oh, and February is historically XRP's worst month anyway. Seven out of eleven years since 2014 have been red in February, with an average loss of -5%. So you had macro weakness, liquidations, fading ETF demand, broken technicals, and seasonal headwinds all hitting at once. That's why we saw a 62% drop from the July 2025 all-time high of $3.65.

The silver lining? Whale wallets have been quietly accumulating through this entire crash, and the SEC case is permanently closed as of August 2025. Ripple also spent $2.4B on acquisitions in 2025 to build out institutional infrastructure. So the current XRP price USD might look weak short-term, but the long-term structure doesn't look broken. Funding rates are at 10-month lows, which historically precedes bounces. Question is whether Bitcoin cooperates in March and beyond.