XRP Short Squeeze Reset: Who Is Short and What I Am Watching

Everybody is talking about the next XRP short squeeze. Here is the part most people skip. The last squeeze already fired. It was Monday. What I want to show you today is who got burned since then, who is loading up again, and the three signals I need to see before I believe the next leg is really coming.

Where XRP and HYPE stand right now

Let us start clean, because both of these moved on Friday. XRP closed at $1.57, up 2.44% on the day. Its range on Friday ran from about $1.52 to $1.63. That puts the XRP market cap at $98.69 billion. When I made a video on it not long ago, it was near $80 billion. It keeps running toward $100 billion.

HYPE closed Friday at $91.85, down about 2.3% on the day. It set a new all time high on Tuesday, September 23, somewhere between $97.96 and $98.03 depending on the exchange. It has pulled back about 6% since then. That is normal. Nothing goes up in a straight line. It goes up, down, up, down. That is how it climbs.

The whole crypto market sits at about $2.979 trillion. That is just under the $3 trillion line it took back on the 21st and then gave back.

The squeeze already fired. It was Monday.

Here is how a short squeeze works. The bears pile in and push the price down. More bears show up. Then something sparks a move up, and all those shorts have to buy back at the same time. That buying pushes the price even higher. Remember when XRP was down near 99 cents and I said the trigger was set? That is the setup I was talking about.

On Monday, September 21, Bitcoin broke above $84,000. In a single hour, about $313 million in crypto positions got liquidated, and 96% of that was shorts. Over the full day, shorts took about 86% of the damage. That was the squeeze. It already happened.

Then Wednesday flipped it on the longs

Two days later the market burned the other side. On Wednesday, September 23, XRP opened at $1.5717 and ran as high as $1.6578. Then it fell to a low of $1.48 and closed at $1.5008. That is down 10.6% from the high in one session.

That day, $507 million in crypto positions got liquidated. $361 million of it, about 71%, was longs. Only $146 million was shorts. Bitcoin took $145 million of that and Ethereum took $104 million.

So in two days you had two opposite blowups. Shorts got buried Monday. Longs got buried Wednesday. The people who made money were the ones in the middle who timed it better. Everybody in leverage is trying to take money from everybody else. That whipsaw is what reset the board. By Thursday XRP traded between $1.45 and $1.55 and closed at $1.5342, and now it is back near $1.57.

Right now the longs are the crowded side

This is the part I really want you to understand, because it is the trap in a lot of short squeeze videos. On perpetual futures, traders pay each other a small fee every 8 hours called the funding rate. When funding is positive, longs pay shorts to keep their positions open. When funding is negative, shorts pay longs.

Negative funding is squeeze fuel. It means the shorts are crowded and paying to stay in. Right now XRP funding is positive on every venue I checked.

On Bitfinex, XRP longs are paying about 19% a year for the privilege of being long. OKX is near 11% and Gate is near 9%. Whatever is crowded in XRP right now, it is not the short side.

Bitfinex also publishes its actual margin book, which is the cleanest number I found. Only 191,888 XRP is borrowed and sold short there, worth about $301,578. On the long side, 4,930,637 XRP is held long, worth about $7.75 million. That is 25.7 longs for every short. Shorts are just 3.75% of the whole book. Bitfinex also pays only 0.03% a year to lend out XRP, which tells you almost nobody is paying to borrow it to short it. Two different measures, same answer.

The big funds just doubled their short

Now here is where it gets interesting. While the little guys are crowded long, the big speculators are loading up short. The CFTC report that went public Friday covers positions through Tuesday, September 22. Leveraged funds on CME went from 719 net short contracts to 1,605 in one week. They more than doubled it.

At 50,000 XRP per contract, that is about 80.25 million XRP net short. At Friday’s price that is roughly $126 million. CME open interest also jumped 29.5%, from 6,706 to 8,684 contracts, about $682.5 million in total value.

And it was new shorts, not people closing longs. In that one week, leveraged funds added 914 short contracts and only 28 long contracts. On the other side, asset managers are net long 793 contracts and dealers are net long 948. This is not a mood on a dashboard. It is a federal filing.

So the pattern is this. They got burned on Monday, they covered, and then they reloaded right away. That is how you set up for the next squeeze. But it is still a work in progress. Funding on most venues is still telling me the longs are crowded.

What the charts are telling me

On the XRP weekly chart, price came back down, bounced off the 13 EMA last week and pushed back up. The big one is the 50 EMA on the weekly. XRP needs to get through it, confirm, and then run. The Bollinger Bands have tightened up, which usually means a big move is coming. I think it breaks to the upside, but this could also turn into a double top, so I am watching it closely.

For HYPE, the weekly candle is red this week while XRP is green. That is okay. Last week, with HYPE near $77, I said I expected $100 within two to four weeks. It got all the way to about $98. I still have two weeks left on that call, and I would love to see it touch $100 by the end of this week. I will keep grading it in public either way.

What I need to see before the next squeeze

I do not want you chasing a squeeze that has not loaded yet. Here is what I am watching:

• Funding has to go negative. When shorts are the ones paying, the fuel is there. Then I feel a lot better.
• The shorts keep building. Next Friday’s CFTC report will show whether leveraged funds keep adding to that 1,605 contract net short.
• Borrowing costs rise. If the cost to borrow XRP to short it goes up, that means more people want to short it.

One warning. If someone shows you a liquidation map from earlier in the month, it is stale. Every number in this article was pulled Friday afternoon, September 25. If you see a number that is a week old, the market has already moved past it.

What I am doing with my own money

I am holding. I am not adding right now and I am not selling. I like holding my crypto over the weekend and letting it play out. The setup for the next squeeze is forming, but it is not done forming. When funding flips and the shorts get truly crowded, that is when a small spark can turn into a nasty cover, and that is when I get more interested.

Keep reading on Stock Moe

• XRP and HYPE Update: What I Am Buying and Why
• XRP and HYPE After the Biggest Short Squeeze Since January
• XRP and HYPE Price Targets for the Next 12 Months

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Sources

• Bitfinex, OKX and Gate funding rate data, read September 25, 2026 at 4:30 PM ET
• Bitfinex public margin statistics, September 25, 2026
• CFTC Commitments of Traders, Traders in Financial Futures, positions as of September 22, released September 25, 2026
• Kraken daily price data, CoinGlass liquidation data, CoinGecko market data

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.