Crypto has a funny way of making experts look like amateurs. If you were watching the charts back in the summer of 2025, you know exactly what I mean. It was a month that felt like a decade. People were screaming about "moon missions" one day and "it's over" the next. But looking back at the XRP price July 2025 action now, the narrative is much clearer than it was through the fog of the daily candles.
Honestly, it was a wild ride.
We saw XRP do something it hadn't done in years. It finally broke the chains of the $2.00 psychological barrier, a level that had felt like a ceiling made of reinforced concrete. On July 1st, XRP was sitting around $2.24. By mid-month, specifically July 18th, it peaked at a staggering $3.65. That’s a gain of over 60% in less than three weeks. You don’t see that kind of verticality in traditional markets without someone going to jail, but in crypto, it was just another Tuesday. Sorta.
The Settlement That Changed Everything
The big driver—the elephant in the room—was the resolution of the Ripple vs. SEC saga. You’ve probably heard the story a thousand times. The case started way back in 2020, and by early 2025, everyone was just exhausted. Then, the news broke. A final settlement was reached where Ripple paid a $50 million penalty.
That was a massive haircut compared to the $2 billion the SEC originally wanted.
The market treated this like a victory parade. When the Manhattan District Court greenlit that settlement and dissolved the remaining injunctions, the "regulatory risk" premium evaporated instantly. Exchanges that had been skittish for years finally opened the floodgates. Volume didn't just return; it exploded.
But it wasn't just the court case.
In July 2025, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act. This wasn't some boring piece of paper; it was the first real federal framework for stablecoins in the U.S. This mattered for XRP because it legitimized the rails Ripple had been building. Suddenly, the idea of XRP as a bridge currency wasn't just a whitepaper dream. It was a legal reality.
Why $3.65 Was the Magic Number
You might wonder why the rally stalled exactly at $3.65. In technical terms, that was the old guard's territory. It was a massive supply zone. Every person who had been holding "bags" since the 2018 all-time high saw $3.50+ and hit the sell button. Hard.
The XRP price July 2025 peak wasn't just a random number; it was a massive transfer of wealth from exhausted long-term holders to new institutional buyers.
- July 1st: $2.24 (The starting line)
- July 10th: $2.40 (The breakout begins)
- July 15th: $2.95 (FOMO kicks in)
- July 18th: $3.49 (The local peak)
- July 31st: $3.10 (The cooling off period)
By the end of the month, the price settled back down to around $3.10. A lot of people called this a "crash." Kinda dramatic, right? In reality, it was a healthy correction. You can't go up 60% and not expect some people to take their profits and run.
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The Institutional Shift
While retail investors were busy staring at 1-minute charts, the big money was doing something else. Seven different spot XRP ETFs were already in play by the end of 2025. By July, these funds had locked up hundreds of millions of tokens.
Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick was out there telling everyone that XRP was on a path to $8 by late 2026. People laughed at him then, but looking at the $1.37 billion in total ETF inflows we’ve seen since, his math wasn't as crazy as it sounded. The supply on exchanges was drying up. In July 2025 alone, exchange reserves hit a two-year low.
Less supply + more demand = higher prices. It’s basic economics, but in the crypto world, we like to pretend it's more complicated.
What Most People Missed
Everyone focuses on the price, but the utility was the real story in July. Switzerland’s AMINA Bank became the first fully regulated institution to support RLUSD (Ripple's stablecoin). This was huge. Because RLUSD runs on the XRP Ledger, every transaction uses XRP for fees.
As banks started deploying RLUSD across payment corridors, the XRP Ledger saw a surge in activity. It created a feedback loop. More stablecoin use meant more XRP burned for fees, which meant less XRP in circulation.
Moving Forward From the July Peak
If you're looking at XRP today, you have to understand that July 2025 was a reset. It wasn't just a price pump; it was the moment XRP moved from being a "legal question mark" to a "financial staple."
We saw that the $3.65 level is the major hurdle to clear. Since then, the market has been consolidating. For anyone trying to make sense of the current volatility, look back at that month. It taught us that regulatory clarity is the ultimate fuel, but even the best news needs time to be "priced in."
Actionable Insights for the Current Market:
- Watch the ETF Inflows: Price follows the money. If the spot ETFs continue to show net positive inflows, the floor price of $2.00 is likely to hold as a long-term support.
- Monitor RLUSD Adoption: The more banks that integrate Ripple's stablecoin, the higher the "burn rate" on the ledger becomes. This is a long-term deflationary pressure on supply.
- Respect the $3.60 Resistance: This remains a "heavy" area. Any move toward this level will likely see significant selling pressure from those who missed the exit in 2025.
- Diversify Your Entry: Don't chase the green candles. As July 2025 showed, even the strongest rallies have 15-20% pullbacks. Scaling in during the "boring" sideways periods is usually the smarter move.
The madness of July 2025 is over, but the structural changes it brought to the market are permanent. The path to the next all-time high isn't going to be a straight line, but the foundation is finally solid.