XRP jumped 8.7% this week, and veteran chartist Peter Brandt says the token is heading to $5.40. That target came from a technical chart pattern he has been tracking, and it landed at a moment when the broader crypto market was already turning.
Traders who had bet against the token got squeezed out, and the forced buying added real pressure to the upside.
Brandt's chart maps a path from XRP's current range to $5.40. That figure would require a climb well beyond where the token trades today. But Brandt's framing suggests the technical setup supports a much larger move than the market has priced in so far. Bitcoin.com reported the prediction, noting that the chart pattern he identified has historically preceded significant advances.
A short squeeze helped push the price higher. When traders sell a token short, they borrow it and sell it, hoping to buy it back cheaper later. But when the price rises instead, those sellers must buy it back at a loss.
That forced buying creates a cycle, and CoinJournal described how this dynamic combined with developments around Ripple pulled fresh attention to XRP.
Ripple's ongoing developments added fuel to the move. While the specific announcements were not detailed in the reports, the broader narrative around the company and its token drew traders back into the market. That attention, layered on top of the squeeze, created the conditions for the 8.7% gain.
BNB crossed $800, and both DOGE and XRP logged double-digit gains, Bitcoin.com reported. The breadth of the move matters because it suggests this was not an isolated spike in one token. Capital rotated across several large-cap altcoins at once.
That kind of synchronized buying usually points to a broader shift in how traders are positioning rather than a single story driving everything.
Cardano joined the XRP Ledger and Solana in a race to power AI agent payments, CoinDesk reported on September 21. The three blockchains are competing to become the infrastructure that autonomous software agents use to transact. That competition matters because it gives XRP a use case beyond speculation.
If payment networks adopt the ledger, demand for the token could look very different from what it does today.
The question now is whether XRP can hold the ground it has gained. Brandt's $5.40 target sits far above current levels. Getting there requires the squeeze to continue, Ripple's developments to keep drawing attention, and the broader altcoin rotation to stay intact. Each of those pieces can break on its own.
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