XRP Stalls at $1.26, Hyperliquid’s $684M Unlock Looms, and Kevin O’Leary Goes All In on ZKP

The hunt for the best crypto to buy now looks very different in June 2026 than it did six months ago. XRP is sliding, down 6.19% in May and clinging to $1.26. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token just stamped a fresh all-time high at $73.73 and overtook Dogecoin by market cap. Both stories are grabbing headlines. Neither one tackles the biggest threat hanging over every digital asset right now: AI that makes things up.

Kevin O’Leary built his fortune on a single principle: confidence is cheap, trust is expensive. He is now publicly backing Zero Knowledge Proof, a project that put $100 million into infrastructure before selling a single public token and is currently priced at $0.0004. Here is why that matters.

XRP: The Right Catalysts, the Wrong Month

XRP wrapped up May with a 6.19% loss and is currently sitting around $1.26. That level is significant analysts point to it as the last solid weekly support before the chart opens up toward the $0.80 to $1.00 range. The weakness is not coming from a shortage of good news. Spot XRP ETFs have pulled in more than $1 billion in cumulative inflows since late 2025, and the CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15 to 9 in May, with a July 4 White House signing target in sight.

The issue is the positioning underneath the price. Binance USDT perpetuals data shows $227.10 million sitting on the short liquidation side versus just $24.04 million on the long side shorts account for roughly 90% of leveraged exposure. That imbalance cuts both ways.

A price hold at support could trigger a violent squeeze upward, but the sheer weight of bearish bets signals that most traders are expecting a breakdown first. June has historically delivered negative median returns for XRP going back to 2014. Right now, patience describes this trade better than aggression does.

Hyperliquid: Record Highs With a Heavy Cloud Approaching

HYPE has been the standout winner of the past 30 days. The token gained more than 65% through May, set a new all-time high of $73.73 on June 2, and pushed its market cap to roughly $18.6 billion clearing Dogecoin by about $1.5 billion. The run was powered by rising network activity, consistent token buybacks, and strong demand for decentralized derivatives trading. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes added momentum to the narrative, arguing that HYPE should at minimum surpass Solana’s market cap before this bull cycle ends.

One number is throwing a shadow over all of it. Tokenomist data shows more than $700 million worth of tokens unlocking between June 1 and 7. The single largest event hits on June 6, when 9.92 million HYPE tokens worth approximately $684 million enter circulation. Polymarket currently prices the odds of HYPE reaching $100 at around 57%, but anyone buying in today is stepping into price discovery territory with a massive supply event days away.

Zero Knowledge Proof: O’Leary’s Answer to AI’s Trust Problem

O’Leary doesn’t back projects because they sound compelling. He backs them because they solve a problem worth serious money. His case for Zero Knowledge Proof is simple and deliberately uncomfortable. AI is now running research, finance, medicine, and law and it gets things wrong constantly. Lawyers have filed court briefs full of cases that never existed. Medical platforms have produced diagnoses backed by studies that were entirely fabricated. O’Leary calls this the trust problem, and ZKP is his answer to it.

The solution is Verifiable Intelligence. Zero-knowledge proof cryptography lets any computation be verified as correct without ever exposing the data behind it. The team didn’t just write a whitepaper about this they spent $100 million of private capital building it before asking the public for anything. Twenty million funded a live four-layer network. Five million locked down the zkp.com domain. Seventeen million went into pre-manufacturing Proof Pods, the physical hardware units that ship globally within five days from existing stock not a production promise, actual inventory.

The Bottom Line

For anyone still working through the best crypto to buy right now, the comparison is straightforward. XRP carries strong institutional tailwinds but faces a structurally weak month and a short book that is dangerously crowded. Hyperliquid has real price momentum, but a $684 million supply unlock is arriving this week that could reset the trade quickly. 

Explore Zero Knowledge Proof:

Website: zkp.com