The XRP Ledger has never been busier, but traders have yet to catch up.
Successful daily payments on XRPL recently hit a 12-month high of more than 2.7 million, up from around 1 million at the end of 2025, according to XRPSCAN data. The network processes between 2 and 2.8 million transactions per day at a frequency of 20 to 26 transactions per second.
Automated market maker pools have exploded to nearly 27,000 active pools supporting over 16,000 unique tokens. The real value of tokenized assets on the ledger has soared to $461 million, up 35% over the past 30 days, according to RWA.xyz. Stablecoin transfer volume during the same period reached $1.19 billion.
XRP is trading at $1.37 and is down 26% year to date. It is 62% below its late 2025 high of $3.65.
This gap between what the ledger is doing and what the token is doing is the biggest thing happening in XRP right now, and it’s a question the market has yet to answer.
The standard crypto thesis is that network activity determines the value of the token. Increased usage means increased demand for the native asset, which drives up the price. This is the framework that worked for Ethereum during the DeFi summer and for Solana during the coin boom.
But XRP breaks the pattern. Every metric that should matter for a utility token is up, but the price is down.
The most likely explanation is structural. XRPL’s growing activity is increasingly driven by RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, and tokenized assets that flow through XRP as a bridge currency but do not create sustained demand for the token.
A payment that uses XRP for three seconds to settle a cross-border transaction between fiat currencies does not generate the same type of buying pressure as someone who stakes ETH for months or locks SOL in a DeFi protocol. The network is becoming more and more crowded, but the token remains liquid and transient. Activity increases, but scarcity does not.
The DeFi numbers make this striking. DeFiLlama shows that the total value of XRPL is stuck at $47.54 million. This is the entire DeFi ecosystem on a chain whose native token has a market cap of $84 billion.
For comparison, Solana carries around $4 billion in TVL. Ethereum has over $40 billion in assets. XRP’s DeFi layer is a rounding error relative to its valuation, meaning that market cap is still overwhelmingly determined by speculative positioning and ETF expectations rather than capital locked into productive on-chain activity.
The native DEX tells a similar story. Daily volume is between $4 million and $8 million according to recent data, modest for any tier 1 and especially low for a tier ranked fifth in terms of market capitalization.
AMM pool growth is real, with 27,000 pools and 12 million XRP deposited, but the monetary value of this liquidity remains small relative to the scale of the token market.
The RWA chart is the only area where the data truly supports the bullish scenario. $461 million in distributed asset value and $1.5 billion in represented asset value puts XRPL ahead of several major chains in specific tokenization categories.
The market capitalization of the stablecoin on the ledger stands at $339 million with 35,800 holders. The 30-day RWA transfer volume of $149 million, up more than 1,300%, suggests true institutional activity rather than wash trading. If the tokenization thesis comes to fruition over the next few years, XRPL will have a position that most competitors do not have.
As such, March historically represents an average return of 18% for XRP, and the $1.27 to $1.30 support zone has held despite several tests. If macroeconomic conditions stabilize and the Iranian conflict progresses toward resolution, a rebound in relief to $1.60 or higher is plausible.
