The XRP ledger has never been busier, but traders have yet to get a grip of it.
According to XRPSCAN data, daily successful payments on XRPL recently reached a 12-month high of more than 2.7 million, up from nearly 1 million at the end of 2025. The network is processing 2 to 2.8 million transactions per day at 20 to 26 transactions per second.
Automated market maker pools have expanded to nearly 27,000 active pools supporting over 16,000 unique tokens. According to RWA.xyz, the value of tokenized real-world assets on the ledger has increased by 35% over the past 30 days to $461 million. Stablecoin transfer volumes reached $1.19 billion in the same period.
XRP is trading at $1.37 and is down 26% year-to-date. This is 62% below the late 2025 high of $3.65.
The intersection between what the ledger is doing and what the token is doing 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 usage means more demand for the underlying asset, which pushes the price higher. This is the framework that worked for Ethereum during the DeFi summer and for Solana during the meme coin boom.
But XRP is breaking the pattern. Every metric that matters for utility tokens 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 generate sustained demand for the token.
A payment that uses XRP for three seconds to settle cross-border transactions between fiat currencies does not generate the same buying pressure as someone staking ETH for months or locking SOL into a DeFi protocol. The network becomes busy, but the token remains liquid and ephemeral. Activity increases but scarcity does not increase.
The DeFi numbers make it clear. DeFiLlama shows that the total value of XRPL is $47.54 million. It is the entire DeFi ecosystem on one chain whose native token has a market cap of $84 billion.
For comparison, Solana has about $4 billion in TVL. Ethereum has over $40 billion. XRP’s DeFi layer has a rounding error relative to its valuation, meaning the market cap is still driven by speculative positions and ETF expectations rather than capital locked in productive on-chain activity.
Native DEXs tell a similar story. Daily volume according to recent data is between $4 million and $8 million, which is modest for any Tier 1 and especially small for the fifth-ranked by market capitalization.
The growth of AMM pools is real, with 27,000 pools and 12 million XRP deposited, but the dollar value of that liquidity remains low relative to the scale of the token market.
The RWA picture is one 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 many larger chains in specific token categories.
The stablecoin market cap on the ledger sits at $339 million with 35,800 holders. The 30-day RWA transfer volume of $149 million, up more than 1,300%, suggests genuine institutional activity rather than wash trading. If the tokenization thesis plays out over the next few years, XRPL has an edge that most competitors do not have.
Thus far, XRP has historically averaged 18% returns in March, and the $1.27 to $1.30 support area has held through several tests. If macro conditions stabilize and Iran moves toward conflict resolution, a relief bounce to $1.60 or higher is possible.