The XRP Ledger has never been busier, but traders still have some catching up to do.
Successful daily payments on The network processes between 2 and 2.8 million transactions per day at between 20 and 26 transactions per second.
Automated market maker pools have ballooned to nearly 27,000 active pools supporting over 16,000 unique tokens. The value of real-world tokenized assets on the ledger rose to $461 million, an increase of 35% in the last 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% so far this year. It is 62% below its 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 has yet to answer.
The standard crypto thesis is that network activity drives the value of the token. Greater usage means greater demand for the native asset, which drives up the price. It’s the framework that worked for Ethereum during the DeFi summer and for Solana during the meme coin boom.
But XRP is breaking the pattern. All the metrics that should matter for a utility token have increased, but the price has decreased.
The most likely explanation is structural. The growing XRPL 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 becomes busier, but the token remains liquid and transient. Activity increases but scarcity does not.
DeFi numbers make this clear. DeFiLlama shows the total value of XRPL set at $47.54 million. That’s the entire DeFi ecosystem on a chain whose native token has a market cap of $84 billion.
For comparison, Solana has approximately $4 billion in TVL. Ethereum has more than 40 billion dollars. XRP’s DeFi layer is a rounding error relative to its valuation, meaning the market cap is still overwhelmingly 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 ranges between $4 million and $8 million based on recent data, modest for any Layer 1 and especially small for one that ranks fifth by market cap.
AMM pool growth is real, with 27,000 pools and 12 million XRP deposited, but the dollar value of that liquidity remains meager relative to the scale of the token market.
The RWA picture is the area where the data really supports the bullish 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.
Stablecoin market capitalization on the ledger stands at $339 million with 35,800 holders. The 30-day RWA transfer volume of $149 million, an increase of more than 1,300%, suggests real institutional activity rather than wash operations. If the tokenization thesis develops in the coming years, XRPL will have a foothold that most competitors do not have.
As such, March historically averages an 18% return for XRP, and the $1.27 to $1.30 support zone has held through multiple tests. If macroeconomic conditions stabilize and the Iran conflict moves toward a resolution, relief is likely to rebound to $1.60 or higher.
