XRP is trading at $1.51 or €1.35 on Monday morning, 0.7 percent above the previous day. This week's pacemaker, though, is not in the chart but in the protocol: three voting deadlines are runn
XRP is trading at $1.51 or €1.35 on Monday morning, 0.7 percent above the previous day. This week's pacemaker, though, is not in the chart but in the protocol: three voting deadlines are running out on the XRP Ledger, and they go live one after another on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon. We did not take the deadlines from a press release but read them directly from the chain's ledger. Between the first and the last activation lie 17 hours and 21 minutes.
What that means for you depends on where your coins are kept. Anyone holding XRP on a trading platform may run into brief maintenance stops in these two windows. Anyone holding their own coins needs wallet software that knows the new rules. And anyone planning to sell should know beforehand how the German holding period counts to the day.
The price stands at $1.51 on Monday morning, €1.35 in euros. Over 24 hours that is a gain of 0.74 percent in dollars and 1.22 percent in euros, over a week 2.95 percent and over 30 days 7.84 percent. Market capitalisation comes to around $95.4 billion, and $1.65 billion changed hands in trading over the most recent day. All figures in this paragraph are based on market data from CoinGecko.
Among the six large names that puts XRP in the middle of the field. Bitcoin managed 3.94 percent over the week, Dogecoin 4.58 percent, Ethereum 2.86 percent and Solana 2.52 percent. XRP remains just under 59 percent away from its record of $3.65 set on July 17, 2025. So there is no exceptional move this week that would justify any haste, just a calendar of dates.
An amendment is a protocol change to the XRP Ledger that the chain's validators vote on and that only takes effect after an uninterrupted majority of 14 days. The validated ledger carries its own entry for this, and that entry can be queried from any public node.
That is exactly what we did on Monday morning. In the ledger with sequence number 107,446,929, 94 amendments were active, and three more were sitting in the waiting window with a majority:
We matched the first and the third identifier against the public amendment list of the XRP Ledger developers, where the same checksums appear. That Permission Delegation is not due on October 5, as initially reported, but only on October 8, is something we had already recorded in our report on the activation in the XRP Ledger; Monday's measurement confirms it to the minute.
Permission Delegation means that an account on the XRP Ledger can assign individual powers to another account without handing over the private key. Until now the chain mainly knew the coarse grid of full access or no access at all.
For private investors that changes little at first. It becomes interesting for custodians, payment service providers and companies that run accounts under dual control: an accounting department can then initiate payments without at the same time being able to change trust lines or re-key the account. That separation is exactly what auditors demand of regulated institutions, and it is why the function counts in the industry as a building block for institutional use.
The back story belongs with the assessment. An initial version of the function was already contained in an earlier release of the node software and was switched off again after a reported bug: one account could charge transaction fees to any other account and drain it that way. The developers documented the finding in a separate disclosure report; the version now coming up therefore carries the suffix V1_1.
Batch groups several transactions together so that they apply together or fail together. For trading applications that is the difference between a clean swap and a half-executed operation that has to be cleaned up. This amendment too ran once already and was deactivated again after a bug, before it came back as BatchV1_1.
Two of this week's three changes are therefore repairs of the project's own mistakes, and the third is explicitly a security fix to the batch procedure. That is no cause for concern, because public bug handling is the desired behaviour in protocols. It is, however, a good reason to look at the week soberly: technology is being brought up to date here, no product is being launched.
Validators and nodes decide with their software version whether they still run along after October 9.
An amendment needs the approval of at least 80 percent of the trusted validators, and for two weeks without interruption. If approval drops below the threshold in between, the count starts again from the beginning. That is why the three dates above are not a guarantee but a projection from the current state of the ledger.
How real that caveat is BatchV1_1 shows itself. Activation had, according to industry reports, already been expected for September, then support slipped below the necessary threshold, and the counter jumped to October 9. So anyone tying a selling decision to an exact date is building on a value that can still shift until Thursday.
The obvious question is whether such dates feed through to the price at all. For XRP there is a fresh test case, and it is only four days old: on October 1 one billion XRP was released from the monthly escrow plan, which we covered in our analysis of the escrow release.
We recalculated the daily closing prices around that event: $1.4901 on September 30, $1.4896 on October 1, $1.4941 on October 2. The release day therefore cost 0.03 percent, and that is less than the usual swing of a quiet trading hour. An announced event with a known date is in the price before it happens.
For the protocol change the same logic applies with one limitation: announced technology rarely moves the price, a botched changeover does. So the sensible way to handle these two days is not a bet on a direction but the question of whether your access to the market works during these hours. If you are planning to switch trading venue anyway, it is worth looking at fees and deposit routes first in the crypto exchange comparison.
A node that does not know an activated protocol change stops following the network. In the jargon this state is called amendment blocked: the software keeps running but no longer delivers reliable data and no longer accepts transactions. That is precisely why trading venues and wallet providers announce maintenance windows ahead of such dates.
Our query on Monday morning went to a public node of the XRPL cluster. It reported software version 3.4.1, 200 connected peers and no blocked state. The infrastructure is therefore prepared; the open question is whether every individual provider has followed suit.
In practice that means for you: do not schedule XRP deposits and withdrawals for Thursday evening after 11:25 p.m. or Friday afternoon between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. of all times. Your provider's status page will tell you whether a maintenance window has been set. And if you are considering moving to a provider under German supervision: since the end of the national transition period every service provider in the EU needs an authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under the MiCA regulation. Whether your provider holds one is listed in BaFin's company database.
Anyone holding XRP themselves needs up-to-date wallet software and the account reserve of 1 XRP.
Anyone moving their coins off the exchange this week meets a peculiarity on the XRP Ledger that does not exist in this form at Bitcoin or Ethereum: every address has to hold a minimum amount permanently. We queried these values too directly at the node on Monday.
From that follows a rule that first transfers regularly fall foul of: a new XRP address that has never been used cannot receive an amount that is below the account reserve. The first transfer to a fresh address therefore has to be larger than 1 XRP, otherwise the network rejects it. Which device is suitable for that and what it costs is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
In Germany, section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies to crypto assets held privately. If you sell XRP within a year of buying, the gain is a private disposal transaction and is taxable at your personal rate. After a year has passed the gain is tax-free, regardless of its size.
Two points are often confused here. First, the exemption limit of 1,000 euros per calendar year: this limit applies to the total of all private disposal transactions, and it is not an allowance. If you are at 1,001 euros of gain, the entire amount is taxable and not just the one euro above it. Second, the ordering: for matching purchases to sales, the first in, first out method generally applies per wallet or account, so the coin bought first counts as the one sold first.
A transfer from the exchange to your own address is not a sale and triggers no tax. Nor does it interrupt the holding period. Even so, you should record the date, the amount and the price of the transfer, because the burden of proving the acquisition rests with you. Anyone with many movements gets through considerably faster with one of the tools from our overview of crypto tax tools than with a spreadsheet of their own.
For levels without reading the tea leaves, a look at our own daily closing prices of the past ten days is enough. The high is $1.5681 from September 26, the low $1.4846 from October 3. Between them lie 5.6 percent, and the current price of $1.51 sits in the upper third of that range.
On the downside, the October low of $1.4846 is therefore the first line at which it will show whether the recovery of the past two days holds. On the upside, the September high at $1.5681 stands in the way first, and it has capped the market for nine trading days. Both values are observed prices and not a forecast; they say where trading last took place, not where it will take place next.
Anyone looking for an outside assessment will find it at the moment mainly on the supply side: the monthly escrow releases increase the theoretically available stock, while this week's activations change nothing about the circulating amount. A protocol change creates no new coins and burns none. Anyone expecting a price reaction expects it from changed usage, and that shows up at the earliest in the weeks afterwards.
(As of October 5, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
