XRP Price History: A Year-by-Year Look Back
XRP has been trading since 2013, which makes it one of the older cryptocurrencies still actively used today. Its price history is a useful backdrop for understanding where XRP sits now — but it's exactly that: background color, not a precise dataset. For actual numbers, this page points you to our own tools rather than asking you to trust a paragraph of prose.
The early years (2013–2017)
XRP launched in 2013 alongside the XRP Ledger and traded at fractions of a cent for its first several years, largely outside mainstream attention. Like most cryptocurrencies from that era, liquidity was thin and price discovery was noisy — a handful of large trades could move the price meaningfully. This period isn't covered by the live historical dataset behind our DCA & Profit Calculator, which starts in mid-2018, so we don't cite specific figures for it here.
The January 2018 peak
Late 2017 into January 2018 was crypto's broadest speculative peak to date, and XRP moved with it — reaching a widely-cited all-time high around $3.84 in early January 2018, per major market trackers like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. That figure predates our own tracked dataset, so we cite it rather than compute it ourselves. You can see exactly how far today's price sits from that peak, updated live, on our All-Time High Tracker.
The 2018–2020 bear market
Like most of the crypto market, XRP gave back a large share of its 2018 gains over the following two years, bottoming during the broader market selloff in early 2020. Bear markets like this are a normal part of crypto's cycle history, not unique to XRP — but they're also exactly the kind of period where "what would I have if I'd bought here" questions become genuinely interesting rather than academic. Our DCA & Profit Calculator lets you check that for any specific date in our tracked range.
The 2021 rally and the years since
XRP participated in the broad 2021 crypto rally, and its price action since then has been shaped in part by factors specific to XRP — most notably the multi-year SEC lawsuit against Ripple Labs, which introduced a distinct source of price-relevant news that most other major cryptocurrencies didn't have hanging over them. Regulatory clarity milestones in that case have historically coincided with notable price moves, though correlation in crypto markets is easy to overstate.
Why we don't turn this into a prediction
It's tempting to read a price history article as a setup for "and here's what happens next" — we deliberately don't do that. See our companion piece on why we don't publish XRP price predictions for the reasoning. History is useful context; it isn't a forecast.
Where to get actual numbers
Everything above is general color, deliberately hedged where we're not certain of exact figures. For real numbers:
- Current price vs. all-time high and recent cycle high/low: All-Time High Tracker
- What a specific past purchase would be worth today: DCA & Profit Calculator
- Who holds large amounts of XRP today: Rich List
All three pull from live or tracked data rather than a static paragraph, so they stay accurate as the market moves — this article won't.