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Ahmed Barakat
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In XRP news, Ripple has now spent nearly nine years below its January 2018 all-time high of $3.84, yet the token still managed an almost eightfold run from roughly $0.49 in November 2024 to $3.66 by July 2025.
YouTuber Moon Lambo argues that long consolidation and a fast breakout are not mutually exclusive, pointing to Quant (QNT) and Zcash (ZEC) as proof that years of stagnation can precede outsized moves.
The comparison establishes possibility, not probability, and the gap between the two is exactly where XRP’s next leg gets decided. In a post on X, Moon Lambo pushed back on the idea that XRP is permanently barred from price discovery simply because it hasn’t broken its old record since 2017.
He said investors who assume XRP is finished should weigh its fundamentals rather than its multi-year price chart, and he framed his own QNT and ZEC positions as evidence that patience can eventually pay off in this market.
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QNT and ZEC Show Why a Long Wait Is Not Conclusive
Moon Lambo bought QNT for about $98 in 2023. It fell to around $54 before recovering to roughly $193, an unrealized gain of about 97% from his entry, and the token later spiked to around $352 before retracing.
That kind of acceleration has precedent: Quant tripled in a single week following a major U.S. banking partnership, the type of concrete institutional catalyst that turns a dormant chart into a breakout.
His ZEC trade tells a similar story on a larger scale. He bought in 2021 near $112, watched it drop to about $20, and has since seen it climb to roughly $1,700 this month, an unrealized gain of nearly 1,417%. According to the primary news reporting, ZEC did little for close to a decade before its current breakout, which is precisely the pattern Moon Lambo wants XRP holders to internalize.
The figures are striking, but QNT and ZEC are not stand-ins for XRP. Market capitalization, circulating supply, liquidity depth, and the underlying catalyst structure differ enough that a percentage gain on a smaller-cap asset says little about what capital would be required to push a token the size of XRP through a nine-year ceiling.
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Can News on ZEC and QNT Boost XRP Demand?
XRP has rallied hard several times since 2018 without ever reclaiming that January high, and Moon Lambo’s argument is that the streak of failed attempts says nothing about whether the next one succeeds.
He believes XRP’s underlying utility has expanded since then, and that prices which look expensive today could look cheap in hindsight if a genuine breakout materializes.
That’s a fair framing, but it cuts both ways. Long sideways action doesn’t automatically mean an asset is dead, yet some assets never recover, lose adoption entirely, or permanently destroy capital for holders who waited.
The difference between the two outcomes is demand, not narrative, and that’s where XRP price-discovery claims need scrutiny rather than analogy.
ETF flows are the most commonly cited demand thesis right now, and XRP ETF demand genuinely matters if it’s sustained and verifiable through issuer-reported figures.
But inflows into a handful of funds have to outweigh spot-market selling pressure that has weighed on XRP’s price action for any ETF-driven bid to translate into a sustained move toward or above $4. Absent that offsetting flow data, treating ETF demand as a settled catalyst rather than a variable is premature.
Turning that possibility into price discovery still requires XRP to do something QNT, and ZEC didn’t have to: prove demand at a market cap and liquidity depth measured in the tens of billions, not millions.
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