There’s a number quietly moving through crypto data trackers that’s making a lot of XRP holders uneasy, and it’s not the price chart everyone’s already staring at. It’s SOPR — the Spent Output Profit Ratio — and right now, XRP SOPR below 1.0 is the phrase showing up in every on-chain analysis worth reading. If you haven’t come across it yet, here’s the short version: it means, on average, people selling XRP right now are selling at a loss, not a profit.

That might sound like a small technical detail. It isn’t. Every time XRP SOPR below 1.0 has shown up in this asset’s history, something significant was happening underneath the surface, and this time doesn’t look any different.

What SOPR Actually Measures

SOPR looks at every coin that moves on-chain and compares the price it’s being sold at now to the price it was acquired at originally. Divide the two, and you get a ratio. Above 1.0 means the average seller is walking away with a profit. Below 1.0 means the opposite — coins are changing hands for less than what their holders originally paid.

It’s a simple idea, but it’s surprisingly effective at capturing market psychology in a way price alone can’t. A chart can tell you XRP dropped from $1.45 to $1.40. SOPR tells you something behavioral: whether the people actually selling are doing so because they’re happy with their gains, or because they’ve given up and are just trying to get out. That distinction matters a lot more than most traders give it credit for, and it’s exactly why the XRP SOPR below 1.0 reading has grabbed so much attention lately.

The Numbers Behind the Current Drop

Glassnode’s data shows the 7-day EMA of XRP’s SOPR sliding from around 1.16 back in mid-2025 down to roughly 0.96 recently. That’s not a small move. Going from comfortably above 1.0 to sitting under it represents a real shift in who’s selling and why. During the stretch when SOPR sat above 1.05 to 1.15, sellers were largely taking profits, which lined up neatly with XRP’s climb toward the $3 range last year. Once that reversed and prices started sliding, the story on-chain changed just as fast.

By the time XRP had drifted down toward the $1.40–$1.45 zone, the 30-day EMA of SOPR had also slipped under the 1.0 line. That’s the detail that made analysts sit up. XRP SOPR below 1.0 wasn’t just a brief one-day blip — it held for long enough to represent a genuine change in market behavior, not a rounding error.

And this isn’t the first time. The last sustained instance of XRP SOPR below 1.0 was back in the 2021–2022 cycle, when XRP fell from just under $2 all the way down to around $0.30. That stretch is basically the textbook example crypto analysts keep referencing whenever this metric comes up again, because the parallels are hard to ignore.

Why This Feels Familiar to Anyone Who Lived Through 2022

If you were around for the last major XRP drawdown, this pattern probably rings a bell. Back then, XRP SOPR below 1.0 persisted for months while price kept grinding lower. It wasn’t a quick capitulation event that resolved in a week. It dragged on, and a lot of holders who bought near the top spent a painfully long time watching their positions sit underwater.

But here’s the part that gets left out of a lot of the doom-and-gloom takes: that same period eventually turned into one of the better setups for patient buyers. Daily active addresses on the XRP Ledger surged something like 490% off the 2022 lows, even while price stayed depressed. That divergence — rising network activity against a flat or falling price — ended up preceding a rally of roughly 114% over the following eight months.

That’s the pattern people are now watching for again. XRP SOPR below 1.0 on its own isn’t a green light to buy, but paired with genuine on-chain activity, it’s historically been more of a “quiet accumulation” signal than a “run for the exits” one.

Who’s Actually Selling Right Now?

This is where the current situation gets more interesting than a lot of headlines let on. When XRP SOPR below 1.0 shows up, the instinct is to assume everyone’s panicking equally. That’s not what the data shows.

Whale-to-exchange flows have stayed near historically low levels through this entire stretch, even as price dropped into the $1.40s. Compare that to what happened during the run-up to XRP’s all-time high near $3.65 last July, when big wallets were dumping aggressively into strength. This time, the large holders appear to be sitting tight. It’s smaller retail wallets doing most of the selling, and that’s a meaningfully different signal than a broad, whale-led exodus.

Meanwhile, XRPL usage hasn’t collapsed. Daily transaction counts were still sitting around 1.83 million in the most recent quarterly read, actually up slightly from the quarter before. Active addresses did pull back to somewhere in the 35,000–49,000 range depending on the source, and payment volume softened a bit too. But offer creation — essentially decentralized exchange-style activity on the ledger — actually grew as a share of total activity. That’s not the picture you’d expect if the network itself were dying, even while XRP SOPR below 1.0 keeps flashing on every dashboard.

What the Price Charts Are Saying Alongside SOPR

Technically, XRP hasn’t given bulls much to work with lately. The price has been pushed toward the lower Bollinger Band repeatedly, which usually points to downside volatility rather than a stable range forming. The daily RSI has stayed below neutral without showing any clear bullish divergence, which would normally be an early tell that selling pressure is fading.

Support-wise, the $1.30–$1.35 zone has been a reference point buyers defended in late 2024, and a clean break below it opens the door toward $1.20. Below that, $1.00 becomes the next big psychological line, and under that, analysts have flagged $0.75 and then $0.50 as the more significant demand zones where buyers have historically stepped back in with size. On the upside, a weekly close back above $1.25–$1.30 is generally seen as the level that would need to be reclaimed before anyone gets excited about a real trend shift.

None of that changes just because XRP SOPR below 1.0 is showing up on the on-chain side. Price structure and on-chain profitability tell related but separate stories, and right now, both happen to be leaning bearish at the same time. That’s part of why this particular setup has drawn so much attention. It’s rare for both signals to align this cleanly.

Is This Actually Capitulation, or Just Stress?

There’s a meaningful difference between full capitulation — where selling spikes sharply and then exhausts itself — and the slower, grinding kind of loss realization that’s been playing out with XRP lately. Volume data suggests we’re seeing more of the second kind. There hasn’t been an obvious capitulation spike so far. Instead, selling has picked up gradually on down days, which looks more like stop-loss activity than outright panic.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to read XRP SOPR below 1.0 correctly. A sharp capitulation event tends to resolve faster, sometimes within weeks, because sellers exhaust themselves quickly. A slow bleed, on the other hand, can drag on for longer, which is closer to what played out during the 2021–2022 stretch that keeps getting referenced as the closest historical comparison.

How This Compares to Other Times XRP Struggled

XRP has been through rough patches before, and it’s worth putting the current XRP SOPR below 1.0 reading next to those earlier episodes instead of treating it as some brand-new crisis. The 2018–2019 bear market saw multiple SOPR breakdowns before a real bottom eventually formed, and the same thing happened again during the 2022 downturn, where several separate capitulation events played out before price finally stabilized. Neither of those bottoms arrived cleanly on the first try. There were false starts, brief bounces that failed, and stretches where it looked like the worst was over before another leg down showed up.

That history matters because it tempers both the bearish and bullish reactions to today’s numbers. XRP SOPR below 1.0 doesn’t mean the bottom is automatically in, and it doesn’t mean the bottom is nowhere close either. It just means the market is in the kind of phase where those bottoms have historically been built, slowly, over months rather than days.

Regulatory noise has also played its usual role in amplifying XRP’s price swings more than most other large-cap assets. Ongoing legal questions and shifting sentiment around Ripple’s broader business have a track record of making XRP’s drawdowns sharper and its recoveries choppier than what you’d see in, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum during a comparable stretch. That’s part of the backdrop behind the current XRP SOPR below 1.0 print — it’s not happening in isolation from everything else going on around the asset.

Where Ripple’s Bigger Picture Fits In

It’s easy to lose sight of this while staring at a falling SOPR line, but Ripple’s actual business hasn’t stood still while price and on-chain profitability have been under pressure. The company has been leaning hard into tokenized real-world assets, positioning the XRP Ledger as infrastructure for tokenized cash, high-grade collateral, and settlement flows rather than just a speculative trading vehicle. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone tracked on-chain are sitting in the billions, and total represented value across tokenized assets on public trackers has climbed into the tens of billions.

None of that erases what XRP SOPR below 1.0 is showing about current holder behavior, but it does add useful context. The network’s underlying use case hasn’t disappeared just because a chunk of retail holders are exiting at a loss right now. If anything, the split between weak short-term price action and continued infrastructure buildout is a fairly normal pattern for crypto assets moving through a rough patch — the chart looks ugly while the groundwork underneath keeps getting laid.

What Happens If SOPR Reclaims 1.0

If XRP SOPR below 1.0 eventually flips back above that line, it would suggest sellers are once again able to exit at a profit on average, which historically has coincided with early-stage stabilization rather than an immediate rally. It’s not a magic switch. But combined with the kind of network activity divergence seen in 2022 — rising usage against flat price — a SOPR reclaim would be one of the more credible signs that the worst of the selling pressure has actually passed.

For now, though, XRP sits in a wait-and-see phase. The metric is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: flagging genuine stress among holders without pretending to predict the next move with certainty. Anyone watching XRP SOPR below 1.0 closely right now is really just watching to see whether this turns into another slow, multi-month grind like 2022, or whether the underlying network strength shortens that timeline this time around. Nobody can say for sure yet — but the data is at least giving holders something concrete to watch instead of just guessing.