XRP broke sharply higher on August 20, surging nearly 19% in 24 hours to briefly touch $1.24 after trading as low as $1.03 earlier in the session. The move pushed the token's 7-day gain to 21.2% and its 30-day performance to 16.5%, a notable breakout after weeks spent capped inside a tight range.
The rally coincided with a burst of RLUSD minting activity on the XRP Ledger. On-chain data showed 900,000 RLUSD minted on August 20 alone, on top of a 20 million RLUSD treasury mint roughly three hours earlier, two separate 10 million RLUSD mints about 11 hours prior, a 12 million RLUSD mint around 19 hours before that, and a 32 million RLUSD issuance roughly 23 hours earlier. Ripple also burned 15.4 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger and 20 million RLUSD on Ethereum within the same window, consistent with the stablecoin's standard mint-and-redeem mechanics rather than net supply growth alone.
Breaking Out of a Multi-Week Range
The size of the move stands out against XRP's recent trading pattern. The token had been boxed between roughly $1.00 and $1.18 since late June, with every attempted rally capped at that upper resistance band as ETF inflows into XRP products shrank month over month — falling from $131.9 million in May to just $27.3 million in July. Thursday's spike to $1.24 marks the first clean break above that ceiling in nearly two months, though it remains well short of XRP's all-time high near $3.84.
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RLUSD's Growing Footprint
Ripple's RLUSD is natively issued on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, fully backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserves held at BNY Mellon and subject to monthly third-party attestations under New York Department of Financial Services oversight. Heavier mint activity around the stablecoin doesn't move XRP's price directly, since RLUSD and XRP are separate assets, but sustained issuance growth is generally read as a proxy for rising transaction and settlement demand across the ledger the two tokens share.
Whether XRP holds above its old resistance band will likely hinge on catalysts outside the stablecoin's growth. The CLARITY Act, which would classify XRP as a digital commodity, faces a Senate cloture vote on September 15 — prediction markets have priced its odds of passage at roughly 30%, down sharply from 82% back in February, making it the main swing factor traders are watching into next month.
