XRP traded at $1.59 as of 2026-08-22 07:08 UTC, up 21.4% over the past 24 hours and roughly 40% over the week - the sharpest leg of a broad crypto rally that also gave bitcoin its best week in two years. A crypto-market-wide short squeeze liquidated more than $1.25 billion in leveraged positions overnight, whale wallets bought roughly 300 million XRP over the past several days, and XRP spot ETFs logged a $13.2 million net inflow on August 20 - all on top of President Trump's August 19 White House crypto meeting, where Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was among the executives Trump pressed Congress to move the CLARITY Act for. Polymarket's XRP-in-August price ladder repriced with it: the $1.60 contract is effectively settled at 99.9c, $1.80 jumped from under 1c to 36c, and $2.00 - a level XRP needs a further roughly 26% run to touch - rose from under 1c to 19.7c. Numbers below are from Gamma and the CLOB order book, fetched at that time.
01A squeeze, a whale bid, and a Wednesday in WashingtonWhat actually moved the price
XRP's week started with the same news that moved bitcoin: Wednesday, August 19, the Treasury said it would at least double the size of its long-bond buybacks and Trump hosted Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, Kraken's Arjun Sethi, Ripple's Brad Garlinghouse, and Gemini's Winklevoss twins at the White House, pressing Congress to pass "a fair version" of the CLARITY Act (this blog covered bitcoin's side of that news cycle on August 20). XRP got a second, sharper leg on top of that news: a crypto-market-wide short squeeze liquidated more than $1.25 billion in leveraged positions overnight into Saturday, August 22, while on-chain trackers showed whale wallets adding roughly 300 million XRP over the preceding several days - buying that thinned exchange supply right before the squeeze hit. The Block reported XRP crossed $1.40 for the first time in months as the move accelerated, and spot trading volumes on exchanges with heavy South Korean participation spiked sharply alongside it. None of that is a CLARITY Act outcome - it is leveraged positioning unwinding into real spot demand - but the same August 19 meeting is also why a slower-moving Polymarket market on the bill itself has been drifting up in the background, which section 04 comes back to.
02Same rally, eleven strikes, one ladderEvery level repriced, not just the near one
Polymarket runs XRP's August range the same way it runs bitcoin's: a ladder of independent yes/no contracts, one per price level, each asking whether XRP touches that level at any point before month end. The two strikes XRP was actually approaching as the squeeze built, $1.80 and $2.00, show the shape of the move best:
Both strikes sat under a cent for most of Thursday and Friday, then climbed together as the squeeze built overnight - $1.80 to 36c and $2.00 to 19.7c by the time of writing, a few cents above where the chart's last print landed a couple of minutes earlier. The strikes below them show the same rally already mostly priced in, and the ones above it show how far the market thinks a squeeze this size can realistically carry XRP before month end:
XRP - WILL AUGUST TOUCH... PRICE 24H
$1.60 99.9c +90.55c
$1.80 36.0c +30.75c
$2.00 19.7c +16.55c
$2.20 8.0c +5.20c
$2.40 5.6c +3.80c
$2.60 7.0c +3.05c
$2.80 3.6c +3.45c
$3.00 3.0c +2.05c
Every rung moved up, none moved down - a broad-based repricing rather than one strike absorbing all the new information. $1.60 has essentially resolved; $1.80 and $2.00 are the two genuinely contested levels left in the ladder, since XRP would need roughly 13% and 26% further moves, respectively, to touch them before September.
03Reading the bookA thin ask at $1.80, a thick bid at $2.20
The order book shows how differently traders are sized into each strike. At $1.80, the closest strike, the book is genuine but shallow: 35.4c bid for 10 shares against a 36.3c ask for 5.82 shares - a real, tight spread with almost nothing resting behind it, the signature of a headline-driven repricing that hasn't yet drawn size. $2.00 is deeper: 16c bid for 25 shares against a 20.4c ask for 75 shares, wider in cents but backed by real depth on both sides. One rung further out, $2.20 is lopsided rather than thin - a 7.1c bid stacked 2,000 shares deep against just 6.65 shares offered at an 11c ask, meaning someone is willing to buy a lot of "XRP touches $2.20" at that price and almost no one is willing to sell there yet.
04A slower-moving number in the same storyThe regulatory market didn't jump nearly this far
Polymarket's own "Clarity Act (H.R.3633) signed into law in 2026?" market - which this blog covered August 7, after the Senate recessed without a floor vote and the contract fell to 13c - has climbed back to 25c, its highest level since before that recess, but was down 4 points over the past 24 hours even as XRP's ladder jumped double digits. That market is pricing a horizon stretching to the bill's real deadline, September 15, three weeks after XRP's August ladder above expires either way. Trump's meeting with Garlinghouse and the other crypto executives on August 19 is the same event behind both moves, but XRP's ladder reacted to it in hours through a short squeeze that has nothing to do with whether the bill passes, while the CLARITY Act market is still grinding toward a September answer one point at a time.
05Watching a repricing ladder liveFrom the terminal, not a dozen tabs
Eight strikes moving together off one overnight story is easy to lose track of a tab at a time. In polymarket-tui, every bracket in an event lists its price and 24-hour move side by side, so a ladder like this one shows up as a single gradient from settled to contested around spot, and drilling into a strike shows the order book depth behind the quote - the difference between a headline move and a headline move with real size resting a cent away.
$ uv tool install polymarket-tui
$ polymarket-tui
No account is needed to browse markets, books, and charts. The install page has Homebrew and one-liner options.