Morning Crypto Report: Crazy $27.4 Million XRP Short Opened, 40% Surge for XRP vs Bitcoin, 815,000 BTC Sold in Just 30 Days

Sunday ends with an action that doesn’t feel like the end of the week at all, because instead of the usual low-energy drift, you get a market that constantly generates new points of tension.

From oversized shorts opened with maximum leverage and almost zero breathing room, to a pure technical setup on the XRP/BTC chart that may resume July’s 40% rally pattern, to the heaviest long-term selloff by holders since early 2024, which now defines the macro picture far more than any intraday swing on Binance or Coinbase.

TL;DR

• One trader opened a short leveraged basket of $196M across BTC/XRP/ZEC.
• XRP/BTC recreated the July crossover setup.
• Long-term holders unloaded 815,000 BTC in 30 days.

Opened short XRP $27.4 million

The Derivatives Board opened the weekend with a block of positions that immediately stood out, not because the market hasn’t seen large leveraged trades before, but because this one was made with an absolute disregard for volatility. The combination of 40x BTC, 20x XRP, and 10x ZEC inside the $196 million block leaves no trading lane – the trader has essentially tied his fate to the next candle rather than any medium-term time frame.

Even an unrealized profit sitting in the green does not provide comfort, because with this degree of leverage, the distance between profit and liquidation is measured in ticks.

At the same time, the former trader who mirrored this aggressive stance is already under water and has lost a significant portion of its book in forced liquidation. The timing—less than a full day after opening—shows how fragile leveraged shorts remain in the current environment where bitcoin it can clear or add several percentage points within minutes and XRP trades in quick bursts rather than controlled waves.

Meanwhile, XRP has bounced around a lot lately, hitting $2.34-$2.36 before falling straight back to $2.20-$2.22. There’s no set pattern to it, so it’s not a place where you can just sit back and relax.

XRP is preparing for a 40% move against Bitcoin

While liquidation and oversized shorts dominate the headlines, XRP represents one of the few structured settings in the entire market. The XRP/BTC pair is replicating the same 23-day and 50-day moving average interaction that defined the July rally, when the pair moved from 0.0000218 BTC to 0.00003073 BTC in a straight 12-day stretch, gaining 40.91% without any meaningful break.

This time, the alignment is almost identical: the moving averages are compressing, the slope matches the summer profile, and the price is sitting right in the initiation zone. A full replication of the July move is not guaranteed, but even a partial repeat puts a 25-30% extension on the table, especially as BTC’s dominance continues to lose definition and can no longer suppress alt pairs by default.

Current Bitcoin price action around the $96,400 area strengthens the setup even more. When Bitcoin fails to determine direction, relative strength assets like XRP/BTC are given the freedom to create independent trends, and this particular configuration has enough historical underpinnings to be more than a coincidence.

815,000 BTC sold in just 30 days

Once the long-term behavior of the holder enters the picture, the macro shot will be impossible to ignore. According to CryptoQuantlong-term holders sold 815,000 BTC in the last 30 days, marking the heaviest distribution wave since January 2024.

Historically, when long-term holders sell in this size, the market does not crash immediately. Instead, it gets into a drifting state where technical signals lose reliability, rebounds weaken quickly and declines fail to escalate as every move competes for a steady injection of supply.

This phase forces misreads: traders mistake pauses for reversals and spikes in volatility for trend changes, but the underlying mechanics are simply absorption of long-term supply.

This sales wave also coincides with a seasonally weak quarter. CoinGlass data already places Q4 2025 in worse territory than Q4 2022 and Q4 2019, both of which remember protracted decline phases that continued despite pockets of intraday strength. The combination of strong LTH outflows and weak seasonal performance creates a stalemate where even logical bounce zones fail to produce trend shifts.

However, there is a competing interpretation. Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley says the market has been in a bearish phase for six months now, not entering it, and that the structure is close to being resolved as ETF-driven liquidity changes the cycle. If correct, this wave of 815,000 BTC represents the final phase of the transition rather than its beginning.

Crypto Market Outlook

Heading into the new week, the market looks like exactly the kind of landscape where nothing is moving cleanly anymore: Bitcoin is hovering around $96,000, alts are trying to build a direction, and the entire market feels driven more by who’s going to be liquidated next than by any real story.

• Bitcoin (BTC): Trading near $96,400, unable to translate volatility into trend.
• Ethereum (ETH): Still reactive, still shadowing BTC without developing independent strength.
• XRP: Holds the purest catalyst through the XRP/BTC cross structure.