When Will XRP Price Stage a Comeback? Here Is What to Look For

Several things that hung over XRP (XRP) for years have now cleared up: the five-year lawsuit is finally dead, seven regulated funds now hold the coin for you, Ripple runs its own dollar stablecoin, and the network it runs on is busier than ever.

Yet the coin still trades at around $1.10, about 70% below the $3.55 cycle high it hit in 2025. That’s the puzzle worth sitting with.

The story got better, but the price didn’t. So here’s the question: Does a better story turn into steady demand to hold XRP, or does the money flow around the coin and leave the price where it is?

The way to answer it is to go pillar by pillar and ask whether each gives anyone a reason to own XRP, or only a reason to use Ripple.

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Where XRP Stands Right Now

XRP sits at No. 6 by market cap, worth about $69.6 billion at the time of writing, and trading near $1.10. That follows a rough June, when it fell about 20% and limped into July barely above $1. On its own, that reads like a coin quietly bleeding out. However, the buying briefly said otherwise.

On July 2, whales were buying while smaller retail buyers held back, and new wallets on the XRP Ledger spiked to a three-month high. But it didn’t last. By July 11, ledger activity fell, with new wallet creation slowing and the price sliding further. Whoever was buying on July 2 didn’t keep showing up.

The wider market also matters here. Crypto as a whole is in a drawdown, with <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/bitcoin-suisse-plans-to-cut-up-to-half-its-swiss-jobs-as-it-shifts-work-abroad/” title=”Bitcoin Suisse plans to cut up to half its Swiss jobs as it shifts work abroad”>Bitcoin (BTC) down about 50% from its October 2025 high. When the biggest asset gets cut in half, money backs away from everything riskier, XRP included.

So two things are true at once: XRP’s price is weak, and so is everything around it.

That reframes the question. Half of XRP’s decline is just the tide going out. The part worth studying is whether, when the tide turns, anything pulls money into XRP specifically.

The Legal Cloud Finally Lifted

For about five years, an SEC lawsuit hung over XRP, keeping big institutions at arm’s length. That chapter is now closed. A 2023 court ruling landed largely in Ripple’s favor, and in mid-2025 both sidesdropped their appeals and settled, with the original $125 million penaltyreduced to $50 million.
By 2026, regulators were treating XRP sold on exchanges as a commodity, the friendlier label, since commodities skip the strict stock-style rules that apply to securities. But that treatment came from a court ruling and an agency settlement, not a statute. A future administration wouldn’t be bound by it the way it would be bound by law.

The law that would lock it in is the CLARITY Act. It cleared the House and a Senate committee, but the merged draft has no Senate floor vote scheduled yet. The August recess is the real deadline, and the two Democratic votes needed to beat a filibuster remain conditional on an unresolved ethics rule.

While its status hasn’t hardened into permanent law, the overhang above XRP did lift, and it’s what has made ETFs and institutional interest possible.

ETFs: Demand Showed Up, Price Didn’t

That regulatory clarity is what let spot XRP ETFs exist, first landing in November 2025. Canary Capital’s XRPC opened with about $58 million of first-day trading volume, the biggest debut of any ETF launched that year. Six more followed, and by early 2026, there were seven US spot XRP ETFs.
The money kept coming. Cumulative inflows hit about $1.47 billion through late June, amid seven to eight straight weeks of net buying. A streak that long and one-directional is the strongest demand signal in the whole bull case.

But the price didn’t follow. Eight weeks of steady buying, and XRP kept sliding. Buying that heavy with no price effect only makes sense if the selling on the other side is at least as heavy. It also helps to know that the funds hold a small slice of circulating XRP, on the order of 1% to 2%.

Then the streak snapped. The week of July 6-10 booked a $7.18 million net outflow, ending roughly two months of straight gains.

ETF demand is the cleanest, most measurable test in the bull case, and so far, access hasn’t turned into a price that holds.

RLUSD, and Its Sharpest Double-Edge

RLUSD (RLUSD) is Ripple’s stablecoin, and it is the sharpest double-edge in the bull case. It launched in December 2024 under a New York state trust license, backed one-to-one by dollar deposits and cash equivalents, with monthly reserve reports from an outside accounting firm. It currently has a market cap of $1.5 billion, up roughly 3x in a year, and is already No. 42 on CoinMarketCap.

The interest is mainstream. Mastercard is piloting RLUSD-powered settlements on Ripple’s infrastructure, and an SBI rollout in Japan is lined up for later in the year.

Here is the other edge: XRP was invented to move money across borders, but a dollar stablecoin does that same job without anyone ever holding XRP, because it is already a dollar on both ends. So, RLUSD’s success can substitute for XRP demand instead of feeding it. A product Ripple owns competes with the coin whose entire valuation it rides on.

The cracks are already showing. RLUSDcooled from its June peak, andmore than 45% of it lives on Ethereum rather than the XRP Ledger it is meant to feed.

Real Usage, but Not Real XRP Demand

On-Demand Liquidity, or ODL, uses XRP as a bridge between two currencies. It converts dollars into XRP, sends that XRP across the ledger in a few seconds, then converts it to the other currency.

The volumes are real. Ripple Payments hasmoved more than$100 billion since it started, and ODL saw more than $15 billion in 2024.
The parts that cut against the coin are just as real. Ripple works with hundreds of institutions, but many stick to a messaging-only service that never touches XRP. And that $15 billion is about 0.01% of the roughly $130 trillion that crosses borders each year.

The deeper problem is built into how ODL works. Holding XRP for three seconds creates velocity and volume, which is a different thing from demand to own and keep the coin. You cross the bridge, you don’t buy it.

The ledger’s activity tells the same story. In March, daily transactions jumped to about 2.7 million, and tokenized real-world assets surged 35% in 30 days—the record activity the bulls point to. But it didn’t hold; by July, ledger activity cooled down, so the Q1 boom looks less like a new baseline and more like a spike that faded.
It’s important to look at what that activity was made of. The lending and trading apps that create real demand to hold XRP are shrinking, with total value locked down roughly 70% from its 2025 peak.

The growth that remained was dollar-denominated, since RLUSD and tokenized assets are priced in dollars. Demand priced in XRP is what’s missing. Record activity next to a falling coin was never a contradiction; it showed what kind of activity this was, and it faded about as fast as that kind of activity tends to.

What Leans Against It: Supply and Competition

Now for the piece most coverage skips. Back in 2017, Ripple locked 55 billion XRP into on-ledger escrows that release up to 1 billion coins on the first of each month, on a schedule anyone can see. Ripple re-locks most of each release, but that still leaves roughly 200 million to 300 million XRP reaching the market monthly, with about 38 billion still escrowed. The fee burn meant to offset it is a rounding error, about 0.014% of supply. You can see the overhang in the gap between XRP’s roughly $109 billion fully diluted value and its $68 billion market cap.

Competition weighs even heavier. Stablecoins are a roughly $309.4 billion market, and two coins run about 83% of it, so RLUSD’s $1.56 billion is a small slice. The sharpest example landed in mid-2026, when Open Standard, backed by more than 140 firms including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and BlackRock,launched a shared stablecoin called Open USD. Ripple is one of those partners, not the hub. When the biggest names in payments build their own dollar token, XRP isn’t the bridge they route through.

Ripple the Company vs. XRP the Coin

Ripple, the company, is doing well. It bought the prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion and rebranded it Ripple Prime, and scooped up a stablecoin firm and treasury software for more than $1 billion combined.

But watch where that growth flows. The collateral moving through the prime business is increasingly RLUSD, the stablecoin; XRP volume there keeps shrinking. The price data shows the same split: in the first quarter of 2026, XRP’s market cap fell 27% even as transactions, tokenized assets, and ETF inflows all climbed.

The valuation is driven mostly by speculation and expectations around ETFs, and actual network usage barely factors in, per Coindesk analysis. None of Ripple’s wins has yet turned into direct, recurring demand to hold XRP.

So, a Real Comeback or Not?

The lawsuit is gone, seven ETFs are live, RLUSD is a regulated stablecoin, and the ledger has at times posted record activity. This isn’t 2018, and it isn’t hype.

But the evidence points one way. Almost every pillar either routes value around the coin or hasn’t moved the price, and the apparent exceptions—the July whale buying and the Q1 activity boom—didn’t hold. RLUSD does XRP’s old job without XRP. ODL holds the coin for a few seconds. The ETF streak ran roughly two months, then broke, and the price never followed it either way.

The forces leaning against XRP are structural. Hundreds of millions of new coins arrive on a fixed schedule, and dollar stablecoins are coming from the biggest names in payments.

The verdict splits cleanly: the infrastructure is real and expanding, while the demand to hold XRP itself isn’t yet proven. And the two have visibly come apart.

That gives you one specific thing to watch, and it isn’t the price. It’s conversion: whether any single pillar starts producing recurring demand to own XRP, rather than demand to move dollars through Ripple’s rails. Until that shows up, the story and the coin are two different bets wearing the same name.

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