The XRP Ledger has never been busier, but traders have yet to catch up.
Daily successful payments on XRPL recently hit a 12-month high of over 2.7 million, up from around 1 million in late 2025, according to XRPSCAN data. The network processes between 2 and 2.8 million transactions per day at 20 to 26 transactions per second.
Automated market maker pools have exploded to nearly 27,000 active pools supporting more than 16,000 unique tokens. Real-world tokenized asset value on the ledger rose to $461 million, up 35% in the past 30 days, per RWA.xyz. Stablecoin transfer volume during the same period hit $1.19 billion.
XRP is trading at $1.37 and is down 26% year-to-date. That’s 62% below the late-2025 high of $3.65.
That gap between what the ledger does and what the token does is the most important thing happening in XRP right now, and it’s a question the market hasn’t answered yet.
The standard crypto thesis is that network activity drives token value. More use means more demand for the original asset, pushing the price higher. It’s the framework that worked for Ethereum during the DeFi summer and for Solana during the meme 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 using XRP for three seconds to settle a cross-border transaction between fiat currencies does not generate the same kind of buying pressure as someone staking ETH for months or locking SOL in a DeFi protocol. The network gets busier, but the token remains fluid and transient. Activity increases, but scarcity does not.
The DeFi numbers make this stark. DeFiLlama shows the total value of XRPL locked at $47.54 million. It is the entire DeFi ecosystem on a chain whose initial token has a market cap of $84 billion.
By comparison, Solana carries about $4 billion in TVL. Ethereum has over $40 billion. XRP’s DeFi tier is a rounding error off its valuation, meaning its market cap is still largely driven by speculative positioning and ETF expectations rather than capital locked up in productive on-chain activity.
The native DEX tells a similar story. Daily volume runs between $4 million and $8 million on recent data, modest for any Tier 1 and especially small for a fifth-ranked by market capitalization.
The growth of the AMM pool is real with 27,000 pools and 12 million XRP deposited, but the dollar value of this liquidity remains thin compared to the scale of the token’s market.
The RWA picture is the one area where the data really supports the bull case. $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.
Stablecoin’s market capitalization on the ledger is $339 million with 35,800 holders. 30-day RWA transfer volume of $149 million, an increase of over 1,300%, suggests real institutional activity rather than wash trading. If the tokenization thesis plays out over the next few years, XRPL has a foothold that most competitors do not.
As such, March has a historical average of 18% returns for XRP, and the $1.27 to $1.30 support zone has held through several tests. If macro conditions stabilize and the Iran conflict moves towards a resolution, an emergency rise to $1.60 or higher is plausible.
