As we near the end of the year 2025, looking at the cryptocurrency market, Ripple’s XRP stands out as an interesting case. Ripple, the company behind XRP, has had a busy year. It ended a long-running lawsuit against the US SEC, formed partnerships with well-known companies, and bought Hidden Road (a prime brokerage company) for over $1 billion. You can learn more about Ripple here.
For nearly the first half of 2025, XRP’s native cryptocurrency performed well in terms of price. In July, its price reached a record high of $3.65, which was the highest value it had ever achieved. However, the growth didn’t last. Since then, the price of XRP has fallen sharply and now trades below $1.90, a drop of almost 50%. Even the launch of new financial products called spot ETF (exchange-traded funds) couldn’t improve its price. Spot ETFs allow people to invest in XRP without directly purchasing it. You can read more about ETFs here. Despite getting investor attention, XRP continued to decline more than 20% just a month after the first ETF was introduced in November.
Many wonder what XRP could do to perform better in 2026 and have a more successful year.
Christmas 2026: XRP’s Situation
Comparing different years, XRP has had a challenging time. In Christmas of 2024, XRP was priced around $2.30. However, during this year’s (2025) Christmas season, the price dropped below $2.00, and even below $1.90, showing a continuous decline. Experts believe it might need a deeper correction before stabilizing again.
To get a better idea, we asked ChatGPT, an AI program, for its analysis. ChatGPT gave several suggestions for XRP to perform better in 2026:
Breaking Out of Its Downtrend
The first suggestion was that XRP needs to break out of its long-term price decline (also called a downtrend). ChatGPT explained that XRP should aim to regain its price of $2.20 and keep increasing until it reaches $2.50. Once that happens, the next challenge would be reaching a price between $3.00-$3.20. However, for this increase to happen, it is very important that many investors buy XRP, boosting its trading volume, which has been low for several months.
Making ETFs More Effective
The second point from ChatGPT was about improving the impact of spot ETFs on XRP’s price. Although the XRP-based ETFs have attracted attention from investors, they haven’t helped the asset much. To succeed by next Christmas, Ripple needs to ensure:
- A steady and larger flow of investments into these ETFs.
- More interest from big financial organizations (called institutions).
- Other major companies like BlackRock and Fidelity to join the XRP ETF market. These firms are some of the biggest names in finance. Learn about BlackRock here and Fidelity Investments here.
Creating Strong Narratives
ChatGPT also highlighted something important – narratives or stories about XRP’s usefulness matter in cryptocurrency markets. For example, Bitcoin (BTC) is known as ‘digital gold’ because people see it as valuable and reliable like real gold. XRP needs a similar strong narrative, such as being the best choice for payments, helping with real-world tokenization (turning physical items into digital assets), or having more success with business-focused partnerships and ETF adoption.
Improving XRP’s Actual Use
Finally, the AI mentioned that XRP would benefit from improving how people and businesses actually use it, also known as on-chain utility. Ripple already has strong payment technology, but it needs larger-scale usage. Here’s what it suggested:
- Increasing transaction volumes happening within XRP’s ecosystem (on-chain settlement volume).
- More banks and financial companies using XRP for liquidity (making transactions easier).
- Expanding ODL (On-Demand Liquidity) corridors, which help transfer money faster and cheaper.
- Building more partnerships with businesses to integrate XRP into their systems.
With these improvements, XRP could see more stable and long-term growth.
The original post discussing this topic was published on CryptoPotato.