XRP Longs vs. Shorts: The Numbers Behind the $1 Battle Aren’t What They Seem

XRP’s fight to hold $1 has come with a side effect: a swirl of derivatives numbers that do not agree with each other.

Open interest figures, long-short ratios, and taker volume splits have all been circulating this week, and Bird, a builder on the XRP Ledger, spent a long post untangling why none of them measure the same thing.

Breaking Down the Real Numbers Bird’s starting point was open interest, the total value of futures contracts still open across exchanges. CoinGlass puts XRP’s OI at roughly $2.7 billion, while other trackers have shown figures closer to $866 million to $1 billion.

The gap comes down to which exchanges and contract types each platform counts, not a disagreement about the market itself. The more confusing part was long-short positioning.