XRP climbed close to 40 percent in the second half of August, moving from about 0.99 dollars to 1.38 dollars between the 17th and the 31st. A rally that size usually drags a wall of borrowed money behind it. This one did the opposite. XRP futures open interest across the market fell while the price ran, and the positioning that did grow landed almost entirely on one venue: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
That gap between a rising price and a shrinking derivatives book tells you who was actually buying.
The price ran and the borrowed bets left
Total XRP futures open interest dropped from roughly 2.77 billion tokens on August 17 to about 2.34 billion on August 31, a decline of around 16 percent over the same two weeks the token gained 40 percent. Open interest measures the pile of contracts still open, so a falling number during a rally means traders were closing positions faster than new ones opened. CoinDesk laid out the two week breakdown and the split underneath it.
Outside CME, the retreat was sharper. Positions across the rest of the market fell by about 533 million XRP, near 21 percent. The traders who stayed in with borrowed money mostly leaned the wrong way: net short exposure among speculative accounts had doubled to roughly 116 million XRP by late August, up from about 57 million a week earlier. Shorts were adding into a rally, the setup that feeds squeezes. For readers new to how those positions unwind, here is how margin turns a small move into a forced loss earlier this week.
CME passed Binance as the biggest venue
The one place open interest grew was the regulated one. CME's XRP futures book rose from 284 million tokens on August 17 to 387 million by month end, up about 36 percent while everyone else cut. Its share of all outstanding XRP futures climbed from roughly 10 percent to around 17 percent in two weeks.
That was enough to change the ranking. The Crypto Basic put CME's position near 410,000 contracts worth about 530 million dollars as of September 1, ahead of Binance at roughly 375,000 contracts and 510 million dollars. A regulated U.S. exchange on top of the XRP futures market is not where this pile usually sits, and it fits a longer pattern in CME's wider push into crypto derivatives. It also echoes an older lesson: open interest can stay parked even as trading volume drains away.
What the spot bid is doing instead
If borrowed money did not carry the move, spot demand had to. The clearest tell sat in the exchange traded funds. Spot XRP funds pulled in 110.49 million dollars during the week ending August 28, described as their strongest weekly haul of 2026. Goldman Sachs held about 87.4 million dollars across five spot XRP ETFs. The buying carried into September, with spot XRP funds adding another 14.4 million dollars on the first.
Institutional money buying the coin outright, while short sellers press futures and the derivatives book thins, is a different market than XRP traded a year ago. It is not automatically bullish. Inflows and price have come apart before, as they did when a Solana ETF took in a billion dollars while the token fell 40 percent. What it changes is the read on this run. The rally was bought, not borrowed, and the venue holding the risk now answers to a U.S. regulator. Whether the spot bid keeps showing up all through September, with the shorts still leaning against it, is the thing to track from here.