The XRP Ledger has never been busier, but traders haven’t caught up yet.
Daily successful XRPL payments recently hit a 12-month high of more than 2.7 million, up from about 1 million at the end of 2025, according to XRPSCAN data. The network handles 2 to 2.8 million transactions per day and 20 to 26 transactions per second.
Automated market maker pools have exploded to nearly 27,000 active pools supporting over 16,000 unique tokens. According to RWA.xyz, the value of real-world assets tokenized on the ledger climbed to $461 million, a 35% increase over the past 30 days. During the same period, stablecoin transfer volume reached US$1.19 billion.
XRP trades at $1.37 and is down 26% year to date. It is 62% below its late 2025 high of $3.65.
The gap between what the ledger is doing and what the token is doing is the most important thing happening with XRP right now, and it’s a question that the market has yet to answer.
Standard crypto theory is that network activity drives token value. More usage means more demand for the native asset, which drives up the price. This framework worked for Ethereum during the DeFi summer and for Solana during the meme coin boom.
But XRP is breaking that mold. Every metric that matters for utility tokens is rising, yet the price is falling.
The most likely explanation is structural. Growing activity in XRPL 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.
Using XRP for three seconds to settle payments for cross-border transactions between fiat currencies does not create the same buying pressure as staking ETH for months or locking up SOL in a DeFi protocol. The network becomes busier, but the token remains liquid and transient. Activity increases, but scarcity does not.
DeFi data makes this even more apparent. DeFiLlama shows that the total value locked in XRPL is $47.54 million. This is the entire DeFi ecosystem on the chain, and its native token has a market value of $84 billion.
By comparison, Solana’s TVL is about $4 billion. Ethereum holds over $40 billion. XRP’s DeFi layer suffers from rounding errors relative to its valuation, meaning market capitalization is still primarily driven by speculative positions and ETF expectations rather than capital locked in productive on-chain activity.
Native DEX tells a similar story. According to recent data, daily trading volume ranges from $4 million to $8 million, which is not large for any Layer 1 and is especially small for the fifth-largest tier by market capitalization.
AMM pool growth is real, with 27,000 pools and 12 million XRP deposited, but the dollar value of this liquidity is still small relative to the size of the token market.
The RWA chart is one area where the data really supports a bull case. $461 million in distributed asset value and $1.5 billion in represented asset value puts XRPL ahead of several larger chains in specific tokenization categories.
The stablecoin on the ledger has a market capitalization of $339 million and has 35,800 holders. Thirty-day RWA transfer volume was $149 million, an increase of more than 1,300%, indicating true institutional activity rather than wash trading. If the tokenization theory holds true in the coming years, XRPL will have a foothold that most of its competitors don’t.
As a result, XRP’s historical average return in March was 18%, and the $1.27 to $1.30 support area has been tested multiple times. If the macro environment stabilizes and the Iran conflict moves toward resolution, an easing rally to $1.60 or higher is possible.
