XRP (XRP) price has fallen 50% over the past year, even as activity on its network climbs toward record highs. The flood of money behind that activity may be part of the reason the price keeps struggling to recover.
The driver is RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, a token built to hold a steady value near one US dollar. It is pulling fresh money onto the network, deepening the pools where XRP trades, while doing little to lift demand for the token itself. That shift has become a recurring thread in recent Ripple news.
XRP Price and Network Activity Have Split Apart
To understand why XRP is dropping even as its network grows, let us view one split in the data. For most of the past two years, on-chain activity moved loosely with the price. Usage climbed during rallies and faded during selloffs, and a correlation check over that period confirms the link.
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Activity on the network’s decentralized exchange (DEX), a marketplace that settles trades directly on-chain without a central middleman, scores about +0.6 against price.
One metric breaks the pattern. Liquidity sitting in automated market maker (AMM) pools shows almost no positive link to price, and recently it has moved in the opposite direction.
An AMM lets people trade against a shared pool of deposited funds rather than against another trader, so the size of those pools reflects committed capital more than daily speculation. That single divergence is where the story begins.
Pool Liquidity Climbs as the Price Falls
Through 2026, the price has trended steadily lower, falling about 22% in the most recent two-month stretch, and the current XRP price now sits near its weakest level in a year, a decline that has dominated recent XRP news. The pools have done the opposite. Total value locked (TVL), the combined worth of all funds deposited across the AMM pools, more than tripled over the same window. Money kept arriving even as the token lost value.
Native DEX volume points the same way. Daily trading on the network’s on-chain exchange in 2026 has run at roughly three times its 2024 average, a steady climb that ignored the falling price. The build-up is not random, and it traces back to one asset arriving on the network in size.
The way that supply arrived matters. It climbed nearly 30% in a month. Yet the number of holders barely moved, rising less than 1% over the same stretch. Fresh dollars went to existing or a handful of wallets rather than a broad new base.
The growth appears to explain the liquidity surge, because a deep and regulated dollar pair gives traders a stable way to move in and out of XRP. The same data carries a warning, though.
Roughly 82% of RLUSD sits in just the top 10 wallets, so the holder base remains thin and concentrated. It also raises a harder question for the price.
Why the Stablecoin Boom May Weigh on XRP
Here the two halves of the story meet. The liquidity boom has not pulled in a wave of new buyers, and active traders and AMM users still rise and fall with the price. That suggests the growth reflects liquidity and settlement rather than fresh speculative demand for the token.
That points to a real risk for the token. If banks and firms settle value directly in RLUSD, they may never need to hold or buy XRP to move money across the network. A stablecoin can flood a network with dollars while quietly competing with its native asset, and the data so far fits that reading. The pools are filling, but XRP demand is not following. Derivatives traders, however, are positioned for the opposite outcome, betting that the price will rebound.
Derivatives Traders Lean Long Into Weakness
That bet shows up in the futures market. XRP open interest, the total value of futures contracts still active, sits near $3.45 billion across 125 perpetual venues. That is heavy exposure for a market trending down, and most of it leans long, meaning traders are wagering on higher prices. The funding rate, the recurring fee that longs and shorts pay each other to hold positions, stays positive on most venues. A positive rate means longs are paying shorts, a sign that bullish bets crowd the market.
A few venues show the reverse, with shorts paying instead, so the conviction is strong but not unanimous. This is the tension beneath the XRP price. On-chain, stablecoin money keeps flooding the network without lifting demand for the token. But in the futures market traders keep betting on a rebound, which could be riskier courtesy of a long flush possibility.
For now, any XRP price prediction depends on whether that liquidity finally turns into real demand for XRP. That could happen mechanically. RLUSD’s largest pool is paired against XRP, and the network often routes payments through XRP as a bridge.Therefore, heavier stablecoin use would pull more XRP into pools and transfers.
The same question hangs over any wider Ripple forecast built on network growth alone, and that single outcome separates a genuine recovery from another slow leg lower.
