XRP Price Mirrors 2017 Sideways Accumulation Trend – Here’s What Happened Last Time

XRP’s recent price action in 2025 was more of a dynamic movement than a simple sideways drift. After rallying strongly earlier in 2025 and pushing to new all-time highs, the cryptocurrency has spent much of the recent months digesting those gains through pullbacks and consolidations.

That structure was referenced in a chart shared on the social media platform X by Steph, which proposed that XRP’s current market behavior is beginning to resemble the long compression phase that preceded its breakout in 2017.

According to Steph’s analysis, XRP has just completed roughly 393 days of sideways accumulation, a duration that almost perfectly matches the 395-day consolidation phase it went through between 2016 and 2017.

During that earlier cycle, XRP spent months moving within a relative range, producing a choppy price action. This kind of extended consolidation reflects a balance between buyers and sellers, where neither side is strong enough to force a decisive trend. 

In 2017, that balance led to a transition into another technical formation of a descending channel before breaking out. The current setup in 2024-2025, at least structurally, shows XRP once again spending an unusually long time building a base in a range. A more detailed look at the chart shows another important similarity with the transition into another descending channel. 

Back in the 2016-2017 cycle, XRP transitioned from sideways movement into a descending channel that gradually pushed the price lower over several months. That downward-sloping structure ultimately resolved with a sharp breakout to the upside.

The 2024-2025 chart shows XRP moving through a comparable descending channel, with price compressing toward the lower boundary before showing early signs of a breakout while attention is still low.

XRP Price Comparison. Source: @Steph_iscrypto on X

The 2016-2017 chart segment above shows XRP trading for roughly 395 days in a broad sideways range between about $0.005 and $0.01. Once XRP broke out of the descending channel in early 2017, price moved up very fast, first reclaiming $0.01, then surging past $0.03 and $0.05 within a few days. The expansion did not stop there, as XRP eventually rallied into the $0.40 region later that year, cementing XRP’s first 5,000% move in its history.

The 2024-2025 chart shows XRP peaking near the $3.40 zone before entering a sideways consolidation phase throughout 2025. Price action is now in the descending channel, which is gradually compressing around the $1.70-$1.90 area.

That channel now looks similar to the location where XRP was in 2017 before its breakout, adjusted for scale. A comparable 5,000% move from the current zone of price action would mathematically project the XRP price to about $100.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView