XRP Jumps 30% and Bitcoin Nears Its Best Week in Two Years — But Outlets Disagree on Why

3 min readPublished 22 Aug 2026

Crypto markets are having one of their strongest weeks in years, and on the headline number, outlets agree: bitcoin is up sharply, and XRP is leading a broad altcoin move. Beyond that top line, the reporting splits — on exact price levels, on the size of bitcoin’s gain, and on what caused it.

The Block‘s headline described XRP leading a broad altcoin rally alongside bitcoin’s biggest weekly gain in two years. Only that headline was available for this review — The Block’s underlying reporting, including any percentage figures for XRP or other tokens, could not be confirmed and is not cited here.

CryptoBriefing, writing separately, put XRP’s weekly advance at roughly 30%, with the token trading near $1.29 and pushing toward $1.30. According to CryptoBriefing, XRP rebounded from a low of $0.9862 the prior week and climbed 10.4% on Wednesday alone, extending to around $1.32 by Thursday. CryptoBriefing noted that level put XRP back near territory last seen before the token’s run toward an all-time high close to $3.65 following its November 2024 rally.

Where the outlets agree — and where they don’t

All three sources describe an unusually large weekly move. But the precise size of bitcoin’s gain differs by report. The Block’s headline frames it as bitcoin’s biggest weekly gain in two years. Bloomberg reported bitcoin was up close to 20% for the week — a pace that would represent its largest weekly advance since March 2024 if the move holds — and said the coin touched an intraday high of $75,740, a 4.2% gain, during Friday trading in Asia. CryptoBriefing, meanwhile, reported bitcoin climbing above $72,000 on Thursday. No outlet ties these two price points into a single confirmed trajectory, and it is not established in the evidence that the $72,000 Thursday level and the $75,740 Friday level describe the same continuous run rather than overlapping but separately sourced snapshots.

The causal story is even more lopsided. CryptoBriefing alone reported that the rally followed a US Treasury announcement of a plan to roughly double its long-term bond buyback program, raising it to at least $4 billion per operation starting Sept. 9. That policy shift, CryptoBriefing said, pushed yields down and coincided with about $3 billion in crypto short-position liquidations within a single day. CryptoBriefing also reported the announcement came ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and executives from Coinbase, Ripple and Robinhood at the White House. Neither The Block nor Bloomberg’s reporting, as held in this evidence, mentions the Treasury buyback plan or the White House meeting at all.

The technical picture, single-sourced

CryptoBriefing reported that XRP’s Relative Strength Index rose to 79.2, a level the outlet characterized as overbought, with its Average Directional Index holding above 29 — a reading CryptoBriefing said indicates a strong underlying trend. The same outlet reported that daily XRP ETF inflows actually declined to $2.35 million from $5.81 million even as bitcoin ETFs took in $517 million in a single day, their strongest total since May, according to CryptoBriefing. XRP futures open interest has fallen 11.31% from levels reached during the rally, CryptoBriefing reported, and the token remains around 17.5% below its 200-day trend by the outlet’s account — a gap CryptoBriefing said leaves further gains necessary for the move to develop into a broader technical reversal. None of these figures appear in The Block’s or Bloomberg’s reporting as summarized here.

What’s unresolved

Readers should treat the scale of the move — a sharp, broad crypto rally led by XRP with bitcoin posting one of its strongest weeks in roughly two years — as the corroborated part of the story. The precise price levels, the exact size of bitcoin’s weekly gain, and above all the causal narrative involving the Treasury and a White House meeting rest on CryptoBriefing’s reporting alone, unconfirmed elsewhere in this evidence.