XRP is looking pretty shaky right now, and honestly, the $1 mark might not hold for much longer.

The token is down 22% to start the year and sitting around $1.38 after dropping 60% from its recent high. If Bitcoin keeps struggling, XRP could easily test that psychologically important $1 level—and there's actually nothing surprising about that if it does. For most of XRP's existence since 2013, it's been trading below $1. The brief periods above that threshold? More of an exception than the rule.

What's really holding XRP back is something most people don't talk about enough: the massive circulating supply. We're talking about 61 billion coins in circulation out of a maximum supply of 100 billion. That's a lot of tokens. Compare that to Bitcoin's fixed cap of 21 million, and you start to see the problem. With such enormous circulating supply, there's just not enough scarcity to push prices higher, no matter how much institutional interest grows.

Here's the thing though—and this is where it gets interesting. Even if XRP crashes to $1, it would still be the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at around $60 billion. It would still dwarf Solana, Cardano, Tron, and Dogecoin. So from a market position standpoint, XRP falling in value doesn't mean it's disappearing.

But let's be real: the circulating supply issue isn't going away. That massive token base is a permanent weight on the price. The regulatory uncertainty that plagued Ripple for years has eased, sure, but the fundamental supply dynamics haven't changed. If you're thinking about buying XRP right now hoping for a moonshot, the math just doesn't work in your favor. The more likely scenario is that we see further downside before any real recovery happens.

I'm watching this one closely, but I'm not convinced XRP is a buy at current levels. The risk of dropping below $1 is very real, and the circulating supply problem means even institutional adoption might not be enough to drive significant gains.