Each quarter compounds its three months — the coarsest grain that still shows a cycle turning inside a single year.
This page compresses XRP's history into four cells per year — Q1 through Q4 — coarse enough to watch a cycle turn inside a single year. XRP can sleep through entire quarters and then decide a year in one: Q4 2024 carried more return than years of preceding cells combined. The Median row stays modest precisely because most quarters were quiet — the mean would tell a distorted story.
Each quarter compounds its three calendar months from UTC daily closes, so a cell is what a position held through those months would actually have returned. XRP's data starts at its perpetual listing in early 2020. Long dormant stretches through the SEC-lawsuit years surround a handful of detonation months, most famously late 2024.
XRP is down 5.8% quarter-to-date in Q4 2026, compounding October through the daily close of 10 October 2026 (UTC). The figure keeps moving until the quarter closes.
XRP returned +43.3% in Q3 2026, its most recent completed quarter, compounding that quarter's three monthly returns. The median Q3 return on record is +27.8%, so it came in above the norm.
XRP's 2026 quarters so far: Q1 −27.2%, Q2 −22.4%, Q3 +43.3%, Q4 −5.8% (in progress). Compounded together they put XRP down 23.8% year-to-date.
2025: Q1 +0.3%, Q2 +7.0%, Q3 +27.3%, Q4 −35.3%. The strongest quarter was Q3 at +27.3% and the weakest Q4 at −35.3%; the full year compounded to −11.6%.
Across 13 completed Q4s on record, the median Q4 return for XRP is −10.9%. The best Q4 was 2017 at +1,065%, the worst 2018 at −39.4%, and 6 of 13 closed positive. The current Q4 is excluded until it closes.
By median return across all completed years, Q3 has been XRP's strongest quarter at +27.8% and Q4 its weakest at −10.9%. Q1 −1.8%, Q2 −9.0%, Q3 +27.8%, Q4 −10.9% are the four medians; they shift as each new year is added.
Across 53 completed quarters, XRP's best was Q2 2017 at +1,159% and its worst Q1 2018 at −77.7%. 29 of 53 quarters closed positive.
The fourth — the late-2024 detonation lands almost entirely in the Q4 2024 cell, one of the most saturated in the whole grid. The three quarters before it are unremarkable, which is XRP's pattern in miniature.
XRP's history here begins at its first daily perpetual-futures candle on Binance in early 2020, so the grid starts with the first quarter completed after that date. All medians are computed from that point on.
Because returns compound. A +10% month followed by a −10% month leaves −1%, not 0%. The quarterly figure multiplies the monthly factors together, which is the return a held position would actually see.