XRP pushed through $1.45 on May 10 after four failed attempts at the same level, then held above it as trading volume jumped 222% from the prior session. The token was changing hands around $1.47 at the time of the article, leaving it up roughly 3% over the past week.
The move matters because XRP had been compressing inside a symmetrical triangle since early February, when it hit $1.60 and then retraced. The pattern showed lower highs on each rally and higher lows on each pullback, a setup that often precedes a sharper move once price finally escapes the range.
Bird, an XRPL developer who built the meme coin DROP, said XRP could rally to $2 and potentially as high as $4. But he also made clear that the upper end of that range depends on something bigger than chart structure alone: a major catalyst such as the CLARITY Act driving a breakout on the scale of what Toncoin and ONDO delivered after their own compression phases.
Bird posted on X on May 9 that XRP was about to do what TON and ONDO had done after similar setups. In the post, he wrote, “Both broke out hard,” and “XRP is next.” The comparison carried weight because Toncoin rallied 350% in the first quarter of 2024 and then jumped another 110% in a single week earlier this month after Pavel Durov said he was taking over the network’s governance. ONDO reached an all-time high of $2.15 in December 2024 after World Liberty Financial bought tokens before that advance.
XRP has already shown how quickly a breakout can fade when the market lacks follow-through. It spiked to $1.60 in March after the SEC and CFTC jointly classified it as a commodity, then rose to $1.51 in April on the biggest week of ETF inflows. Both moves gave back their gains within days, a reminder that traders who bought higher have been waiting to exit if the price revisits their level.
That is the tension now around the $1.44 to $1.45 zone. Heavy selling from underwater investors could stall the rally even after the breakout, and a delay in the CLARITY Act past the Senate’s May 21 recess could do the same. So could a drop back below $1.30 support, which would break the pattern that has been building since early February and put the recent surge at risk of becoming another short-lived burst.
For now, the chart is doing what bulls wanted: it cleared resistance, held the level, and did so with a surge in activity that traders can see on the tape. The next test is whether XRP can turn that one-day breakout into something more durable, or whether the old selling at $1.45 proves stronger than the new momentum behind it.
