ETH and XRP Hit All-Time Highs—Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter

Crypto’s big dogs are barking—but who’s listening? Ethereum and Ripple just notched record prices, yet the champagne stays on ice. Here’s the cold truth behind the hype.

The Illusion of Growth

ATHs don’t mean squat when inflation-adjusted gains vanish faster than a DeFi rug pull. ETH’s 2025 ‘moon’? Try a 12% real-terms slump since 2021. XRP’s ‘surge’? Still 60% below its 2018 peak after adjusting for three monetary apocalypses.

Liquidity Theater

Exchanges are painting tape with OTC wash trades—volume spikes look sexy until you realize three market makers control 47% of the order book. Retail FOMO? More like hedge funds playing hot potato with leveraged longs.

The Regulatory Sword

SEC chair’s latest ‘come at me bro’ tweetstorm could vaporize XRP’s gains faster than a Celsius withdrawal. Ethereum’s merge? Already priced in since 2022—just ask the NFT bros now flipping burgers.

Wake us when these ‘milestones’ actually put cash in grandma’s retirement account. Until then? Enjoy your number-go-up dopamine hits—Wall Street’s algo traders certainly are.

Entering price discovery mode WOULD have marked a significant milestone, considering ETH hasn’t been this valuable since November 2021.

It also would have served as a moment of vindication for ETH investors, who have had to contend with a lot in recent years. Mania surrounding NFTs came and went. The blockchain successfully shifted from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. Attention turned to solana as the meme coin craze set in. And demand for ETFs tracking Ether’s spot price on Wall Street suffered a rather underwhelming debut.

While the current retraction is pretty modest — dragging ETH back to the $4,300 mark — two key challenges stand in the way of further gains.

Monday saw the second-highest level of outflows out of Ether ETFs since their launch last summer, indicating that institutional investors are taking profits off the table. Meanwhile, Bitcoiners have claimed that an “unstakening” is happening. JAN3 CEO Samson Mow pointed to figures that show 909,788 ETH is now in an exit queue — with a wait time of 15 days and 19 hours for claims to be processed.

The Unstakening continues. Soon to reach 1M in ETH heading for the exit. Wait times are also increasing. pic.twitter.com/3RnBDEyuPB

Of course, ETFs tracking the spot price of XRP don’t exist in the U.S. — yet. That may or may not happen later in the year. But when it comes to the third-largest cryptocurrency, a similar price story is playing out.

XRP is now clinging on to $3, but just a few short weeks ago, was flying high at $3.65. To put this figure into context, that’s just 20 cents away from an all-time high of $3.83 established back in January 2018. The “XRP Army” — a vocal and committed band of investors — have been waiting over seven years for a new record.

In any case, there are Bitcoiners who argue that the fiat value of ETH and XRP doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things — and even if a record price was set in cash terms — it wouldn’t be all that impressive.

Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company, has been measuring both of these altcoins using a different metric: their conversion rate to BTC.

On X, he recently shared a chart that shows ETH’s all-time high against BTC actually happened back in 2017, when 0.14 ETH would get you 1 BTC. He added:

“ETH is down 76% from its all time high in 2017. It’s unlikely to ever recover.”

The point he’s trying to make is this: while bitcoin has continually accelerated to new records with each cycle, ETH has been stuck trying to return to former glory.

Bitcoin was worth $60,161.25 on the day of Ether’s last all-time high — and since then, has rallied by 91%. If ETH had grown at the same pace, over the same timeframe, it would now be trading at a cool $9,341.

The figures are even more stark when you crunch the numbers for XRP, which was the second-largest cryptocurrency in CoinMarketCap’s rankings in January 2018. At that point in time, Bitcoin was worth $15,600, meaning it’s appreciated by 637% over the past seven-and-a-half-years.

So… what would have happened if XRP also ROSE at Bitcoin’s pace from that initial price of $3.84? Well, at the time of writing, it would be worth about $24.50.

Rochard’s point is that both ETH and XRP have collapsed in value against the world’s biggest cryptocurrency — statistics that underline an often-repeated argument among Bitcoiners that only BTC is the fastest horse. While both altcoins have performed impressively over the past 12 months, the same can’t be said if you zoom out to a multi-year timeframe.

That will weigh heavily on the likes of Strategy and MetaPlanet when making allocations, and help explain why Bitcoin treasury companies are now well established, while similar ventures for ETH and XRP haven’t taken off.

Impassioned altcoin investors will argue that both of these coins still hold great potential — and it’s a matter of when, not if, they accelerate to new all-time highs.

But perhaps a more pertinent question is this: can they hold on to these gains, and what will Bitcoin be worth at that stage?