In June 2025 Ripple's chief executive Brad Garlinghouse told the XRP APEX conference in Singapore that XRP could take 14 percent of SWIFT's volume within five years. SWIFT is the messaging network banks use to send payments worldwide. XRP cost 2.15 dollars at the time. In July it reached a record close of 3.55 dollars on Binance, and in November the first US spot ETFs launched. On 24 September 2026 XRP closed at 1.53 dollars.
The story behind the token is simple: banks use Ripple, Ripple uses XRP, so XRP rises with every bank that signs up. The first part is true. This piece starts with the second: what the XRP Ledger is, who uses it for what, which claims hold up, and what all of it has done for the token.
The XRP Ledger is an exchange that can also send payments
The XRP Ledger is its own blockchain with a built-in exchange. Trading on it needs no third-party smart contract, because order books and automated liquidity pools are part of the protocol. Every transaction costs a fraction of an XRP, and that fee is burned.
All 100 billion XRP were created at the start, and no new ones are added. On 25 September 2026 the ledger showed 99,985,609,130 XRP in existence. Over its whole history, about 14.4 million have been burned, roughly one hundred-thousandth of the supply.
What makes XRP unusual is not the technology but the ownership. A large part of the supply sat with one company, Ripple Labs, from the start, and a good share of it still does. More on that below.
With XRP, one company has a hand in how much of the token reaches the market.
So what actually happens on this chain?
The ledger mostly trades, it barely pays
The xrpscan explorer counts what happens on the ledger. Daily averages over 30 days to 23 September 2026:
| Period | Transactions per day | of which payments | new accounts per day | successful |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sept 2024 | 1.55m | 0.62m | 1,083 | 98.4 % |
| Jan 2025 | 2.35m | 1.36m | 8,731 | 84.2 % |
| Aug/Sept 2026 | 2.02m | 0.83m | 2,684 | 78.0 % |
46.6 percent of all transactions are orders on the built-in exchange and 41.0 percent are payments. 22 percent fail, mostly because an arbitrage attempt found no matching path. The public data does not separate genuine XRP payments from swaps of other tokens or automated trading.
The amounts on the chain are small. DeFi applications held 47.3 million dollars on 25 September, according to DefiLlama. Stablecoins on the ledger come to 1.15 billion dollars, 93 percent of it Ripple's own stablecoin RLUSD. Tron holds 94 billion. For tokenised securities, RWA.xyz ranks the XRP Ledger tenth with 0.50 billion dollars and a 1.2 percent market share. Ethereum holds 41 percent.
The XRP Ledger moves a lot of transactions and very little money.
If the money isn't on the chain, where do banks use XRP?
Ten claims, checked
The claims below come from named people or companies. Each one sits next to what the data says.
| Claim | Who, when | What the data says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| XRP takes 14 % of SWIFT volume in five years | Brad Garlinghouse, June 2025 | Ripple's payment product settles in "RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or fiat", per its own page. Tom Zschach, former CIO of SWIFT, in July 2026 on an XRP integration: "Not happening." | forecast, not backed today |
| Banks use XRP for payments | Garlinghouse, April 2025 | Ripple reports "over $100 billion" in payment volume without an XRP share. The last published figure for its XRP product is from the Q4 2022 report. It has been missing since the report for late 2023. | partly holds |
| XRP is the bridge currency | Ripple product page | Garlinghouse himself, in a clip circulated on 24 Sep 2026: "It could be that XRP is the best bridge asset … or it could be that, no, a stablecoin is going to solve that problem better." | partly holds |
| $5.50 by end-2025, $8 by end-2026 | Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered, April 2025 | Close on 31 Dec 2025: $1.84. In February 2026 Kendrick cut the target to $2.80. | does not hold |
| $100 by end-2025 | Jake Claver, Digital Ascension Group | $1.84. Claver in January 2026: "timelines always get extended." | does not hold |
| ETFs bring $4–8bn in year one | JPMorgan, early 2025 | $1.75bn cumulative net inflows after just over ten months (SoSoValue, 23 Sep 2026) | does not hold |
| ETFs soak up 22.4bn XRP in year one | Chad Steingraber, November 2025 | The five US spot ETFs held 906.8m XRP combined on 30 June 2026, about 4 % of that | does not hold |
| Fixed supply, no inflation | Crypto.com University, August 2025 | No new XRP, but Ripple releases about 300m XRP a month from escrow into circulation | partly holds |
| The XRP Ledger is the chain for tokenisation | Ripple product page | Tenth place with 1.2 % market share (RWA.xyz) | does not hold |
| The SEC lost, XRP is not a security | widespread after July 2023 | Exchange sales were not securities transactions, institutional sales of about $728m were. The $125m penalty and the injunction stand. | partly holds |
The bank announcements of the past two years follow the same pattern. BNY holds the reserves of RLUSD, not XRP. DBS and Franklin Templeton trade a tokenised money-market fund against RLUSD. Japan's SBI is bringing RLUSD to Japan, on Ethereum. Mastercard, WebBank and Gemini plan settlement in RLUSD, "subject to obtaining the required regulatory approvals". In 2025 Ripple bought the prime broker Hidden Road for 1.25 billion dollars and the treasury software firm GTreasury for 1 billion. None of these announcements documents a payment in XRP.
RLUSD itself mostly does not live on the XRP Ledger. On 25 September DefiLlama showed 1.39 of 2.47 billion dollars on Ethereum, 56 percent.
Ripple is growing. It is just building more and more of that growth around a different token.
What does that mean for the amount of XRP reaching the market?
Ripple releases more each month than the ETFs buy
In 2017 Ripple locked most of its XRP in time-locked accounts called escrows. Each month 1 billion unlocks, and whatever Ripple does not need goes back into a new escrow. On 25 September 2026, 31.70 billion XRP sat in 100 such escrows, releasing monthly from October 2026 to May 2029.
On balance, billions still move into circulation. By Ripple's own figures, the escrow fell from 37.13 to 32.60 billion XRP between 31 March 2025 and 30 June 2026, about 300 million a month. Ripple's total holdings fell by about 270 million a month. That is not a record of sales: Ripple can also use the XRP to pay partners or, as with the treasury company Evernorth, contribute 126.8 million XRP in kind. Ripple stopped its quarterly sales reports after the second quarter of 2025.
On the other side are the ETFs. Between the first launch on 13 November 2025 and 30 June 2026, the five US spot ETFs bought 906.8 million XRP combined, about 120 million a month.
| Monthly | XRP |
|---|---|
| Ripple releases into circulation (net, Apr 2025–Jun 2026) | about 270–300m |
| US spot ETFs buy (Nov 2025–Jun 2026) | about 120m |
The ETFs that were supposed to soak up supply absorb less than Ripple releases every month.
And how has the price behaved over the years?
Since 2018, almost everything rests on one month
Monthly returns in US dollars from Binance monthly candles, June 2018 to August 2026, 99 complete months:
| Jun 2018 to Aug 2026 | since Jan 2023 | |
|---|---|---|
| Swing of monthly return, XRP / BTC | 45.8 / 18.9 % | 46.3 / 14.9 % |
| Months in which BTC fell | 47 | 17 |
| … of those, XRP did better than BTC | 18 | 5 |
| … of those, XRP fell too | 41 | 14 |
| Median in those months, XRP / BTC | −14.4 / −8.4 % | −10.6 / −7.1 % |
| Months in which BTC rose: XRP did better | 16 of 52 | 8 of 27 |
| Median in those months, XRP / BTC | +4.6 / +12.1 % | +2.9 / +11.0 % |
XRP swings more than twice as hard as Bitcoin, mostly falls along in falling months and mostly lags in rising ones.
Across all months, one dollar in XRP in June 2018 became 2.26 dollars by the end of August 2026. One dollar in Bitcoin became 10.50. A single month does almost all the work. In November 2024, after the US election, XRP rose 282.9 percent. Without that one month the dollar would have become 59 cents, a loss of 41 percent.
Anyone who held XRP since 2018 is in profit because of a single month.
Calendar years, first open to last close:
| Year | XRP | BTC |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 (from June) | −43.0 % | −50.5 % |
| 2019 | −44.7 % | +94.4 % |
| 2020 | +13.9 % | +301.9 % |
| 2021 | +277.7 % | +59.8 % |
| 2022 | −59.1 % | −64.2 % |
| 2023 | +81.6 % | +155.6 % |
| 2024 | +238.4 % | +121.3 % |
| 2025 | −11.6 % | −6.3 % |
| 2026 (to Aug) | −25.1 % | −10.3 % |
The Binance high on a closing basis was 3.5504 dollars on 22 July 2025. On 24 September 2026 XRP closed 56.8 percent below it. The January 2018 high predates the Binance listing and is not in this data.
The obvious objection
"The SEC case is over, there are six ETFs, and Ripple is buying one company after another. The institutions are here."
They are here, at Ripple. After just over ten months the ETFs have collected about 1.75 billion dollars, less than half of JPMorgan's low estimate for the first year. The acquisitions are software, custody and trading. And the lawsuit ended in a split ruling: the 125 million dollar penalty for the institutional sales stands. Institutional interest in Ripple is not the same as institutional demand for XRP.
What this means for you
When you read a Ripple announcement, ask what it moves: XRP, RLUSD or software. In the bank announcements checked here from the past two years, it was almost never XRP.
When you hold XRP, you do not hold a share in Ripple. You hold a token of which the company still has 31.7 billion in escrow, releases a net 300 million or so a month into circulation, and whose price since 2018 rests on a single month.
You cannot buy Ripple. Buying XRP means betting on what Ripple no longer needs.
Three numbers show whether that changes: RLUSD's share on the XRP Ledger (44 percent today), monthly ETF purchases against Ripple's releases (120 against 300 million XRP), and a published figure for how much payment volume actually settles in XRP. The third number has not existed since late 2023. The open question is whether Ripple will publish it again.
FAQ
Does Ripple sell the released XRP? Not verifiably. Ripple stopped its quarterly sales reports after the second quarter of 2025. What is documented is that its holdings are falling. Where the XRP goes, whether to exchanges, partners or in-kind contributions, Ripple no longer discloses.
Why is the SEC case marked "partly holds"? Judge Analisa Torres ruled on 13 July 2023 that sales on exchanges to anonymous buyers were not securities transactions, while direct sales to institutional buyers were. The final judgment of 7 August 2024 set a penalty of 125,035,150 dollars. Both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025.
How are the monthly returns calculated? Opening price on the first day of the month to closing price on the last, XRP and BTC each against USDT on Binance, without fees. May 2018 is left out because the first candle after listing carries a distorted opening price. September 2026 is still running and is left out of all comparisons.
How reliable are the ETF inflows? The cumulative net inflows come from SoSoValue, as reported by Crypto Times and 24/7 Wall St. The holdings in XRP come from the five funds' quarterly reports to the SEC as of 30 June 2026.
All XRP monthly returns in US dollars
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | −23.5 | −7.0 | −23.0 | 73.7 | −22.0 | −19.7 | −4.5 | |||||
| 2019 | −11.3 | 1.5 | −1.6 | −0.1 | 42.1 | −9.6 | −19.4 | −19.4 | −0.3 | 14.8 | −23.5 | −14.4 |
| 2020 | 24.2 | −4.4 | −24.2 | 21.8 | −4.2 | −13.4 | 47.9 | 8.4 | −14.0 | −0.8 | 177.2 | −66.9 |
| 2021 | 125.5 | −16.1 | 37.1 | 180.6 | −34.9 | −32.1 | 5.6 | 58.9 | −19.6 | 16.7 | −10.3 | −16.9 |
| 2022 | −25.6 | 26.5 | 4.3 | −28.3 | −27.9 | −21.2 | 14.2 | −13.6 | 46.5 | −3.3 | −12.1 | −16.9 |
| 2023 | 19.7 | −7.3 | 42.8 | −12.5 | 9.8 | −8.5 | 47.5 | −26.7 | 0.8 | 16.5 | 1.1 | 1.5 |
| 2024 | −18.2 | 16.6 | 7.2 | −20.4 | 3.4 | −8.0 | 30.9 | −9.1 | 8.0 | −16.7 | 282.9 | 6.8 |
| 2025 | 45.7 | −29.3 | −2.6 | 4.8 | −0.8 | 2.9 | 35.2 | −8.2 | 2.6 | −11.8 | −14.1 | −14.5 |
| 2026 | −10.6 | −16.5 | −2.5 | 2.0 | −2.6 | −22.0 | 2.1 | 29.9 | 13.9* |
Figures in percent. *September 2026 to 25 Sep, month not complete.
Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast. Historical patterns are not a promise.
Sources: XRP Ledger nodes (xrplcluster.com, s1.ripple.com): ledger, account_objects (25 Sep 2026) · xrpscan API metrics (25 Sep 2026) · DefiLlama: TVL, stablecoins, RLUSD by chain (25 Sep 2026) · RWA.xyz Networks (25 Sep 2026) · Binance XRPUSDT/BTCUSDT monthly candles (25 Sep 2026) · Backtesting Arena, asset snapshot XRPUSDT (24 Sep 2026) · ripple.com/xrp (as of 30 Jun 2026), Q1 2025 XRP Markets Report, Q4 2022 report (31 Jan 2023), Ripple Payments · CoinDesk: Garlinghouse on SWIFT (13 Jun 2025), Standard Chartered (31 Dec 2025), SEC settlement (26 Jun 2025) · Yahoo Finance: Tom Zschach (10 Jul 2026) · Times Tabloid: Garlinghouse (24 Apr 2025, 24 Sep 2026), Steingraber (19 Nov 2025) · 24/7 Wall St.: Kendrick cut (20 Feb 2026), ETF inflows (19 Sep 2026) · The Crypto Basic: Claver (12 Dec 2025, 2 Jan 2026) · Crypto Times, ETF inflows per SoSoValue (24 Sep 2026) · Crypto.com University (11 Aug 2025) · SEC EDGAR: 10-Qs of the XRP ETFs from Bitwise, Canary, Franklin, 21Shares, Grayscale (30 Jun 2026); Evernorth 8-K (4 Nov 2025) and DEFM14A (27 Aug 2026) · Cooley on the Torres ruling (27 Jul 2023) · Ripple press releases: Hidden Road (8 Apr 2025), GTreasury (16 Oct 2025), Mastercard/WebBank/Gemini (5 Nov 2025), SBI (24 Jun 2026) · BNY (9 Jul 2025) · DBS (18 Sep 2025)
Study the Past — Improve your Future 🥋