XRP and HYPE After the Biggest Short Squeeze Since January

Monday was the biggest short squeeze since January. Bitcoin traded above $85,000 for the first time this year, about $750 million in crypto bets got wiped out, XRP jumped about 10%, and HYPE printed its third all time high in a week. I own both XRP and HYPE, so here is what actually happened, why I think it happened, and the numbers I am watching. Some of this is very good. Some of it is not. You are getting both halves.

The biggest short squeeze since January

Total crypto liquidations were about $750 million in 24 hours. Of that, $648 million was shorts, meaning bets that the price would go down. In a single 60 minute window, as Bitcoin crossed $84,000, $262 million of those shorts got wiped out.

XRP was the move of the day. It had one of the most crowded short positions going in, and it finished up about 10%. Total crypto market cap went back to roughly $3 trillion, up nearly 7% in a day. That was not a slow grind higher. That was shorts getting forced out.

This was a macro day, not a crypto day

Here is the honest part. Crypto did not lead on Monday. It rode along. Oil collapsed, with Brent and WTI both down about 2.5% after Saudi Arabia partially restored pipeline capacity. Lower oil means lower expected inflation, and that is the whole chain of causation here.

The Nasdaq had its best day since early August, up 2.26%. The S&P 500 gained 1.49%. The 10 year Treasury dropped back under 5%, to about 4.95%, after closing Friday at 5.01%. Anything over 5% is fearful. When the 10 year comes down, every risk asset gets easier to own. That is the actual mechanism behind Monday.

So be careful how you frame this one. This was not crypto breaking out on regulatory news. The CLARITY Act is still dead. The Fed is still hiking. Crypto rallied despite both of those things, and most of the credit belongs to the macro picture.

The XRP levels I am watching

XRP was about $1.55 Monday night, up roughly 10% on the day and about 8% on the week, with a market cap near $97 billion. Two of the biggest price sites were still showing $1.42 hours after the move, so pull the live number before you act. The move landed exactly on a level. The 50 week moving average is at $1.56. XRP has been under that line for months, and it is sitting right on it now. If we break that line, giddy up, because we are going up.

• First support: $1.41. That is where the move started and it is the line that has to hold.
• The 50 week moving average: $1.56. The line in the sand.
• Next wall: $1.60. The biggest on chain volume cluster above the price, roughly 2.5 billion XRP.
• August high: $1.70. The level that caps this range, roughly another 10% of room.
• The 200 week moving average: $1.99. The one that would change the whole structure.

A weekly close above $1.56 would be the first time XRP closed above its 50 week average in months. That is what I want to see this week.

The Batch amendment is over the line

Something activates on the XRP Ledger in seven days. The Batch amendment has 30 of 35 validators today. That is 85.71% against a threshold of more than 80%, which works out to 28 validators, and it has held above the line since September 15. The expected activation date is September 29, exactly two weeks after the majority clock started.

Batch groups up to eight transactions so they all succeed or all fail together. That is delivery versus payment, which is what institutions ask for.

The new lending amendment has zero votes

Now the part nobody has noticed. Everybody keeps talking about XRP lending. The brand new lending amendment, LendingProtocolV1_1, shipped September 16, and not one validator has voted for it. Here is where every amendment stands.

• BatchV1_1: 30 of 35. Over the line and holding.
• SingleAssetVault: 17 of 35. Climbing, not stuck.
• LendingProtocol: 13 of 35. Unchanged for weeks.
• fixCleanup3_4_0: 12 of 35. Also climbing.
• LendingProtocolV1_1: 0 of 35. Shipped September 16. Not live.

Code shipping and a feature activating are two completely different events. If somebody tells you XRP lending is about to go live, ask them what the validator count is. I bring you this stuff because I want you to have both sides, even when it turns off viewers who only want to hear what they already agree with.

The XRP supply story, both halves of it

The good half first. Tracked exchange balances fell about 645 million XRP on the week, to roughly 21.27 billion. Whales absorbed about 1.54 billion XRP, worth around $2.2 billion, in a 96 hour window ending Friday.

Now the other half. XRP also poured into Binance at 663% above its quarterly baseline, about 21.7 million coins a day. And Binance’s actual reserve finished the week essentially flat at about 2.63 billion tokens, because outflows offset the inflows. Gross flows were huge in both directions.

So the honest read is position adjustment, not a clean supply squeeze. The spikes line up with the failed Senate vote on the 15th and the Fed hike on the 16th. What I want to see is exchange reserves going lower, because that is what sets up a real liquidity squeeze. We are not there yet.

The money stopped coming into XRP funds

The ETF story is still the weak spot. Cumulative net inflow into US spot XRP funds since they launched is $1.71 billion. Net flow for the week ending September 18 was $9.57 million. That is couch cushion change. Thursday was an outflow day at minus $5.15 million, and Friday was another at minus $43,699.

For comparison, the week ending August 28 pulled in $110 million, eleven times last week’s total. Monday’s flows are not published yet, so do not let anybody quote you a number.

HYPE: third all time high in seven days

HYPE hit a new record of about $96 on September 21, and faded back into the low to mid 90s by the evening. That is three records in a week: $89.65 on September 6, about $94.45 on September 19, and now about $96. Each record has lasted only a few days before the next one replaced it.

HYPE is up about 17% on the week, against Bitcoin and Ethereum both up about 8%. Understand what this one is, though. On the nasty days, it gets hit hard. On the beautiful days, it runs. That is the trade.

The business underneath HYPE

Hyperliquid is the top earning project in crypto. You are getting into a business when you buy this one, so do not get in if you do not believe in the business. From January 1 through September 15, per CoinGecko research, it made $429 million in revenue, 13% of the $3.40 billion generated across every tracked project this year.

• Total value locked: $7.46 billion, up from about $7.05 billion two days earlier.
• Annual revenue run rate on DefiLlama: $695 million, essentially flat from last week.
• Perpetual volume in 24 hours on Monday: $5.67 billion, up about 29% from the weekend.
• Bought and burned: 48.8 million HYPE, about 4.9% of max supply.

The buy and burn is the whole idea here: revenue buys the token, the supply shrinks, and the price gets support. Once perpetuals are legal in the US and everybody can trade them the right way, I think Hyperliquid does some great things.

The $860 million unlock headline is almost certainly wrong

You will see $860 million quoted everywhere for the October 6 core contributor unlock. It comes from the whitepaper maximum of about 9.92 million HYPE a month. On September 6, the actual claim was 433,419 HYPE, about $41 million and about 0.19% of the float. That is roughly 4.4% of the theoretical maximum.

Every monthly claim on record has landed somewhere between 1.4% and 17.6% of the ceiling. Not one has ever come close to the full amount. And after the March unlock, only about 1.75% of those tokens reached an exchange within 30 days.

One number I have to correct: Hyperliquid’s share slipped

Hyperliquid is still number one in perpetual DEX volume at $5.67 billion in 24 hours. But its share is about 28%, down from closer to 32% last week. Variational moved up to second at $3.29 billion on adjusted volume, Aster is third at $1.44 billion, and Lighter is fourth at $1.11 billion. I am using adjusted volume, which discounts incentivized and wash volume. On raw numbers the ranking flips around, so ask which column somebody is using.

What would make me wrong here

• It was leverage. Open interest rose 7.59% to $156 billion during the squeeze. New longs chased.
• Bitcoin ETFs dried up. The week ending September 18 took in $6.2 million, the smallest in 141 weeks.
• Ethereum ETFs saw outflows of $140 million on the week, snapping a four week run of inflows.
• The Fed is still hiking. Markets price roughly a coin flip on another hike at the October meeting.
• Washington is no help. Nothing on any congressional calendar this week, and CLARITY is still 49 to 50.
• Sentiment flipped fast. Fear and Greed is in greed at 70. Six days ago it was neutral at 51.

Open interest rising during a short squeeze means people are chasing with borrowed money, not buying spot. That is what makes this move fragile.

Eight dates on my calendar

• September 23: flash purchasing manager surveys.
• September 25: quarterly options expiry on Deribit, about $16.6 billion of open interest.
• September 29: the XRP Ledger Batch amendment activates if support holds.
• September 30: August inflation data and the federal funding deadline, same day.
• October 1: the next monthly XRP escrow window.
• October 6: the monthly Hyperliquid core contributor claim.
• October 20: comments close on the SEC’s 146 page crypto rule proposal.
• October 27: the Fed meets, and Ripple’s own conference opens the same day.

September 30 is the day to circle. Inflation data and a funding deadline landing together is exactly the kind of collision that ends a leveraged rally. I am bullish through the end of this month, but at that point I may be making changes, and I will say so.

My read on both of these

XRP has one job: close a week above the 50 week average at $1.56. Below $1.41, Monday was just a squeeze that got sold. HYPE is already in price discovery. At a record high there is no trapped supply overhead, and it has the strongest revenue line in the asset class behind it. What worries me on both is leverage, dried up ETF money, and a Fed still raising rates into it.

Constructive on both, cautious on the fuel. That is my actual position, and every line of it has a number you can check against me in the coming weeks.

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Sources

• CoinGlass via The Block and CoinDesk; TheStreet market wrap; US Treasury daily yield curve, September 21, 2026
• Binance, CoinGecko, Crypto.com, CoinMarketCap, Coinbase and CoinPaprika price data, September 21, 2026
• The Crypto Basic technical analysis; Santiment and CryptoQuant on chain data; XRP Insights supply and ETF reports
• Live XRP Ledger amendment data via the XRPSCAN API, September 21, 2026
• DefiLlama, CoinGecko revenue research, Tokenomist, crypto.news, CoinDesk on the volatility perpetual launch
• Zerocap weekly wrap, alternative.me Fear and Greed, senate.gov, BEA, Federal Reserve, xrpl.org, federalregister.gov, Deribit

I am not a financial advisor and nothing in this article is financial advice. Everything here is my own opinion, for educational and entertainment purposes only. Do your own research and talk to a licensed professional before you make any financial decision.