Sentiment falls to an eight-month low, and that has been a buy signal before

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse called it “the moment” for the industry, saying the industry deserved “the same rules and protections as every other asset class.”

Standard Chartered projected $4 billion to $8 billion in additional inflows into U.S. spot XRP exchange-traded funds if the bill passes. They have attracted roughly $1.4 billion since January, according to SoSoValue data.

The same discrepancy shows up on the XRP Ledger blockchain. Payment counts, automated market making activity and tokenized real-world assets all hit records this year while the token’s price kept falling. Pilot projects kept stacking up, including one that had Ondo, JPMorgan’s Kinexys, Mastercard and Ripple settling tokenized Treasuries across the ledger in seconds.

Santiment pointed to the same split, with development activity, ledger usage and institutional products advancing as social enthusiasm faded.

The exhaustion has a history. Santiment noted that some of XRP’s strongest rebounds came when the crowd was at its most disinterested, with discussion volume falling and commentary overwhelmingly negative, the same setup as now.

Sentiment readings are a contrarian tool and not a timer, however. The signal indicates that the sellers who talk have mostly stopped talking. Whether that marks a turning point depends on whether the demand that years of waiting were supposed to unlock finally shows up.