XRP and XLM were the two names dropping the fastest on Thursday morning, but they were not really the story. The story was a producer-price report that came in hotter than the market wanted, and a Federal Reserve that is now being priced to hike, not cut, in six days.
A Hotter Inflation Print Landed Right Before the Open
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August Producer Price Index at 8:30 a.m. ET on September 10. Final demand prices rose 0.4% for the month, a sharp pickup from July’s 0.1% gain and June’s 0.1% decline. On a 12-month unadjusted basis, the index is now up 5.4%.
Core producer prices, stripped of food, energy, and trade services, rose 0.3% in August and are running 4.7% higher than a year ago. Energy did a lot of the damage on the headline number, up 4.2% for the month, with diesel fuel alone jumping 24.1%.
None of that is a crypto number. But it landed at the worst possible moment for a market that had spent the last few weeks hoping inflation was cooling enough to keep the Fed on hold, or even cutting. Instead, Fed funds futures tracked by CME’s FedWatch tool have been pricing rising odds of a hike at the September 16 FOMC meeting, a real reversal from where those odds sat just a week or two earlier.
The Selloff Wasn’t Isolated to XRP and XLM
XRP fell to $1.3544, down 4.4% on the day per CoinGlass’s own live pricing. XLM was off a similar amount, down roughly 3.7% to around $0.178. But almost everything else moved the same direction at the same time.
Bitcoin slipped to about $77,100, down close to 1.8%. Ethereum eased 1%. Solana dropped nearly 3.9%, and Dogecoin fell close to 5.9%. Zcash was the hardest hit of the majors, down almost 11% in 24 hours after weeks of outsized gains.
That spread, small-cap alts and mega-caps all red at once, is the signature of a macro-driven selloff rather than a token-specific story. Nothing broke in the XRP Ledger or Stellar’s own network today. The move was priced entirely off a government inflation report.
$465 Million in Long Positions Got Wiped Out
CoinGlass’s own liquidation tracker shows $543 to $545 million in total futures liquidations across the market in the 24 hours around the release, with $465 million of that coming from long positions and only about $80 million from shorts.
That lopsided split says the market walked into this report leaning long. On Binance’s own XRP/USDT futures book specifically, long liquidations ran to $5.88 million against just $174,970 on the short side over the same window, a more than 30-to-1 gap.
XRP and XLM’s Charts Are Both Retesting the Same Kind of Zone
On the 4-hour chart, XRP/USD has been carving a clean descending trendline off its recent local high, with price now sliding back down into a support band roughly between $1.31 and $1.34. Today’s drop pushed price right to the top edge of that zone.
XLM/USD shows the same shape on the same timeframe: a descending trendline from its own local top, with price now back inside a support shelf between roughly $0.172 and $0.180.
Two different assets, same technical picture, same day. That is consistent with a market-wide repricing rather than two coincidentally similar setups.
Positioning Still Leans Long Into a Fed Decision Six Days Out
CoinGlass’s XRP dashboard shows open interest sitting at $2.97 billion in futures, with 24-hour volume of $3.82 billion. Long/short ratios across the biggest venues, Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, are mostly sitting just under 1.0, meaning shorts have a slight numerical edge in count, but Thursday’s liquidation data shows longs are still the side actually getting hurt.
The next FOMC decision lands September 16, six days from this report. A market that has spent most of 2026 debating rate cuts is now, at least for the moment, pricing real odds of the opposite outcome. If that pricing holds into next week, today’s pullback in XRP, XLM, and the rest of the market may turn out to be the opening move rather than the whole story.
