The analyst is saying that XRP has badly lagged Bitcoin despite several months of optimism from parts of the community.
XRP has spent the better part of three months going nowhere while Bitcoin (BTC) climbed from around $60,000 to $80,000, and one chart analyst is done pretending otherwise.
According to them, the gap between community expectation and actual market performance has rarely looked wider.
XRP Has Been Losing Ground to Bitcoin Since 2017
UK-based technical analyst ChartNerd laid it out plainly in a post on Monday:
“I’m sorry to break this to my $XRP community. I’m just tired of the constant hopium: we have been underperforming Bitcoin since 2017, with NO signs of any major rotation. In fact, over the last 3 months, BTC has climbed 60K-80K while $XRP/BTC has lost its 20 MEMA.”
That 20-period exponential moving average on the XRP/BTC pair is a metric traders use to track medium-term momentum in one asset relative to another. Losing it, as ChartNerd’s chart shows, puts the pair back toward the bottom of its long-term range.
Historically, that lower zone is where XRP has delivered its most explosive outperformance against Bitcoin, including the one in November 2024. But the analyst is careful not to spin that as a near-term buy signal. The pattern has to confirm first, and right now, the breakdown is what has confirmed.
“While BTC has climbed 60-80K, $XRP has done nothing but trend sideways, all while the XRP/BTC pair is breaking down,” ChartNerd added in a follow-up post.
In a separate May 21 update, the analyst noted the XRP/BTC pair had been declining for 15 consecutive weeks, directly explaining why XRP’s USD price had gone essentially flat over the same period.
“I expect $XRP will likely underperform against Bitcoin for the majority of the year,” he wrote.
Subdued Short-Term Outlook
The short-term picture is similarly subdued, with XRP trading around $1.36 at the time of writing, within a tight 24-hour range of $1.34 to $1.37.
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ChartNerd has identified $1.30 as a key support level, and he expects resistance in the $1.40 territory on any recovery attempt, describing that zone as a potential support/resistance flip.
His longer-range bear case points toward the $0.90-$0.70 area if broader conditions deteriorate, while he has noted that XRP’s 2-week regression band lower boundary is currently sitting near $1.00.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, is trading around $77,000 after a rough stretch that saw it drop to just above $74,000 last week. However, it has recovered on news of progress in US-Iran peace talks, and its dominance over the rest of crypto has remained above 58%.
That high dominance figure is itself part of what is weighing on XRP and most altcoins: when Bitcoin is absorbing the majority of capital flow, altcoins tend to lag.