XRP is fighting to hold the $1 price level, and the futures market is sending mixed signals. Open interest numbers vary wildly depending on the tracker, while Binance data shows fresh short positions building even as most accounts remain long. Morgan Stanley's latest 13F filing reveals continued institutional exposure to XRP through several ETFs.
Open Interest Numbers Don't Agree
CoinGlass reports XRP open interest at roughly $2.7 billion. Other trackers put the figure closer to $866 million to $1 billion. The gap comes down to which exchanges and contract types each platform counts, making it hard to get a clean read on total leverage.
Longs vs. Shorts: A Balanced Notional Picture
About 75% of accounts trading XRP are long, with 25% short. But that doesn't mean the market is lopsided. Every futures contract pairs a long with a short, so notional exposure is balanced on both sides. Trader ChartNerd initially posted a long-short split of 51.5% to 48.5%, but later corrected that, saying the real numbers were $304 million in long volume against $375 million in short volume over 24 hours. He admitted his earlier math was off.
Taker buy/sell volume in the last 24 hours runs about 45% buy and 55% sell, which points to selling pressure keeping XRP pinned near $1.
Binance Data Points to Fresh Shorts
Binance's own numbers show open interest climbing about 28.6% over two weeks, reaching $232.7 million by August 17. Perpetual CVD slid to negative $463 million over the same stretch, a sign that fresh short positions are being added. Spot flow swung from positive $153 million to negative $231.8 million, meaning traders are pulling money out of the spot market even as they build leverage on the derivatives side.
That combination — rising open interest and falling CVD — typically indicates new shorts rather than new longs.
Morgan Stanley's XRP Footprint
Morgan Stanley's latest 13F filing shows the bank kept its exposure to XRP through Franklin, REX-Osprey, and Bitwise ETFs. The filing also reveals a stake in Armada Acquisition Corp II, which is tied to Ripple-backed Evernorth Holdings. That institutional footprint gives XRP a layer of validation that many other tokens don't have, even as the price hovers around $1.
The $1 level is the line in the sand. Spot flows are negative, perpetual CVD is at -$463 million, and taker volume leans toward sells. Whether XRP holds will depend on whether spot buyers return after two weeks of outflows.
