XRP sentiment falls to 8-month low, and that has been a buy signal before

Social chatter support for XRP has dropped to levels not seen since October, a point that has previously been a cue for traders looking to make short-term bullish bets on the Ripple-linked token.

According to onchain analysis firm Santiment's weighted sentiment metric, which combines the ratio of positive to negative posts on a token with the volume of commentary, the reading sat at minus 0.908 on Thursday, the lowest this year.

XRP traded at $1.14 on Friday, up 2.3% on the day, but down sharply from January levels above $2.40 and roughly 69% below its July high.

Price is only part of it, Santiment said in an X post, adding that traders have grown tired of waiting for activity after years of anticipation around Ripple's legal position and institutional adoption. Many appear to have moved on or cut their expectations.

The fatigue has cut in even as developments supporting the sixth-largest token by market capitalization have started to proliferate.

In May, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act. That bill would classify XRP as a digital commodity under Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight and write into federal law guidance the agency established in March.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse called it "the moment" for the industry, saying the industry deserved “the same rules and protections as every other asset class.”

Standard Chartered projected $4 billion to $8 billion in additional inflows into U.S. spot XRP exchange-traded funds if the bill passes. They have attracted roughly $1.4 billion since January, according to SoSoValue data.

The same discrepancy shows up on the XRP Ledger blockchain. Payment counts, automated market making activity and tokenized real-world assets all hit records this year while the token's price kept falling. Pilot projects kept stacking up, including one that had Ondo, JPMorgan's Kinexys, Mastercard and Ripple settling tokenized Treasuries across the ledger in seconds.

Santiment pointed to the same split, with development activity, ledger usage and institutional products advancing as social enthusiasm faded.

The exhaustion has a history. Santiment noted that some of XRP's strongest rebounds came when the crowd was at its most disinterested, with discussion volume falling and commentary overwhelmingly negative, the same setup as now.

Sentiment readings are a contrarian tool and not a timer, however. The signal indicates that the sellers who talk have mostly stopped talking. Whether that marks a turning point depends on whether the demand that years of waiting were supposed to unlock finally shows up.