XRP short squeeze: $2.02M wiped in one hour, 851% imbalance

In a single hour on Sept. 15, 2026, XRP saw $2.02M of short-position liquidations against $1.58M of long liquidations, an 851% hourly imbalance that came as price ran into a dense wall of limit buy orders in the $1.38 to $1.39 range and tripped short-side stops into a $1.44 short-term peak.

The forced-covering cascade landed on the eve of a U.S. Senate vote on the CLARITY Act and a Federal Reserve interest-rate decision, with 30-day liquidity turnover on Binance reaching about $4.6B and a Binance liquidity index of 0.0675, its highest level in about six months.

Funding had gone defensive on Binance

By Sept. 17, Binance's XRP perpetual funding rate sat at about -0.0053%, with Bybit still slightly positive. Negative funding on Binance means short traders were paying longs, a sign that positioning had tilted away from crowded bullish leverage, not toward it. That defensive short book was the kind of thin positioning a fresh bid could push through, tripping stop-losses and forcing covering. The setup fails if Binance funding flips positive, or if open interest keeps falling so far that there is no leverage left to liquidate. By Sept. 17 itself, Binance's OI-weighted funding rate had already flipped back positive, meaning even those defensive conditions had unwound.

Where the leverage sat

XRP futures open interest remained near $2.86B on Sept. 17 per CoinGlass, with a separate CoinGlass print the same day putting total OI at about $2.798B, down from recent highs. Per CoinGlass, broader derivatives open interest stood at $871.22M as of Sept. 17, down from $1.128B in August, a drop of more than $250M in under a month, evidence that the broader book had thinned into the move rather than built.

The wider picture

The Fed raised rates 25bp to 3.75% to 4% on Sept. 17, its first increase since 2023, and the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act the day before. XRP was trading around $1.30 on Sept. 17 after rebounding 1.2% on Sept. 16, with an intraday low near $1.25 and a high above $1.31, still about 10% lower over seven days. Ahead of the Fed decision, $26.9M of XRP long positions had been liquidated during the recent volatility against only $3.59M of shorts per CryptoCompass, meaning on the broader move longs took roughly seven to eight times the pain of shorts, even though the Sept. 15 hour itself ran the other way.