While bitcoin had already broken record highs and some corners of the crypto space such as meme coins and artificial-intelligence (AI) tokens experienced exorbitant gains, XRP had so far been notably absent from the action. When measured against bitcoin, XRP prior to today’s move had slid to a 3-year low, TradingView data shows. Even with this afternoon’s big jump, XRP is now only up 17% year-to-date, substantially underperforming BTC’s 64% advance and the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index 54% gain.