Report: Ripple and the XRP Ecosystem in the first half of 2026

First half of 2026: Ripple\'s network is busy, but the currency price has dropped by half.

In the first half of 2026, Ripple\'s construction speed is so fast that even XRP prices cannot keep up. From January to June, XRP ledgers set new records in network activity, tokenized assets and stablecoin applications, while Ripple signed multiple agreements involving banking, payments and custody on four continents. However, XRP itself lost nearly half of its value in those six months. The divergence between busy books and falling tokens became Ripple\'s signature narrative in the first half of the year, and the market has not yet resolved this contradiction.

Data: Busy ledgers, falling tokens

Messari\'s \"XRP Status Report for the First Quarter of 2026\" is the clearest quarterly snapshot. Key data pointed in two directions:

XRP closed at US$1.34, down 27.1% month-on-month. Its market value fell 26.3% to US$82.21 billion, but it still ranks fourth in non-stablecoin crypto assets, behind BTC, ETH and BNB.

The average daily transaction volume of XRPL increased by 35.3% month-on-month, from 1.83 million to 2.48 million, of which payment transactions accounted for slightly more than half.

Circulation supply increased slightly by 1.1% to 61.34 billion, and about 33 billion XRPs are still in custody locked state.

The U.S. spot XRP ETF held 775.4 million XRPs at the end of the first quarter, accounting for approximately 1.26% of the circulating supply.

The decline did not stop in the first quarter. By the end of June, XRP was trading close to $1.03, the lowest level since late 2024 and down about 50% from the beginning of the year. In early July, prices rebounded slightly to around $1.10. ETFs are one of the few direct sources of demand for XRP because they buy tokens on the open market. As of mid-June, cumulative net inflows were approximately $1.43 billion and approached $1.48 billion by the end of the quarter, although the funds recorded their first net outflow in several weeks on June 30.

RLUSD becomes the protagonist

If XRP is the one lagging behind, then RLUSD is the growth engine. It covered most of Ripple\'s announcements in the first half of the year:

On the XRP ledger, the market value of RLUSD at the end of the first quarter was US$340.3 million, a month-on-month increase of 45%, making it the largest stablecoin on the ledger.

Its total market value on the chain, most of which is located in Ethereum, reached a record high of about $1.7 billion at the end of May, after nearly doubling supply in a quarter to about $1.72 billion in early June.

Token Terminal data shows that transfers in the first quarter reached US$18.4 billion, setting a record in a single quarter at that time, with more than half of them concentrated in March.

In early June, RLUSD was expanded to more than 40 networks through Wormhole\'s native token transfer protocol, and MasterCard incorporated it into its all-weather online settlement network.

Ripple\'s broader payment platform exceeded US$100 billion in processing capacity in early March, after integrating Palisade and Rail\'s acquisitions to build Ripple Payments into a single fiat and stablecoin channel for enterprises. Garlinhaus said that RLUSD has ranked among the top ten stablecoins about 18 months after its launch.

Why haven\'t XRP prices kept up?

This is a question every XRP holder asks in the first quarter, and the answer is quite simple. Most of Ripple\'s 2026 victories will be built on RLUSD, not XRP. When a cross-border payment is settled in RLUSD on the XRP ledger, the only purpose of XRP is to pay network fees, which cost only a fraction of a penny per transaction. This is a real application, but it does not generate enough buying pressure to push up the price of a token with a market value of tens of billions of dollars. Analysts have repeatedly pointed out that Ripple did not use XRP as a settlement asset for all of its blockbuster transactions this year. Currently, XRP prices follow more market and macro interest rate concerns than any dynamics on its own books.

Transactions, Licensing and New Markets

Ripple\'s transaction flow in the first half of the year was very institutional and geographically intensive. The following are the highlights in chronological order:

January: Partnered with DXC Technology to embed custody and payment functions into the bank\'s core systems; launched Ripple Treasury for institutional liquidity and RLUSD settlement.

February: Working with Aviva Investors to explore tokenized fund structures on XRPL; integrating Hyperliquid through Ripple Prime to enter the institutional DeFi derivatives space.

March: Ripple Payments upgraded and exceeded the US$100 billion processing milestone; partnered with Convera to achieve cross-border payments settled in stablecoins (Convera processes approximately US$190 billion annually for more than 26000 commercial customers); and expanded significantly in Brazil.

April: Settlement of tokenized government bonds with Kyobo Life Insurance pilot in South Korea; a custody agreement was reached with KBank.

May: Obtained US$200 million in debt financing; established partnership with EDX Markets through Ripple Prime.

June: Expand RLUSD in Turkey through Bitexen, Bitlo and BiLira; deepen cooperation with Bitso in Latin America, including the launch of MXNB on XRPL; obtain preliminary MiCA CASP license approval in Luxembourg; integrate Flutterwave for remittances in sub-Saharan Africa; jointly launch RLUSD with SBI Group in Japan.

The launch of SBI in Japan is the most eye-catching. After receiving approval from the Financial Services Agency of Japan, RLUSD became the country\'s first \"fourth category\" foreign stablecoin, distributed to retail and institutional users through SBI VC Trade. However, the details are more conservative than advertised: RLUSD runs on Ethereum rather than XRP ledgers in Japan, and has a limit of approximately 1 million yen (approximately US$6200) per transaction.

Within the ecosystem: Function and funding

Three underlying changes are as important as transaction flows.

On the technical level, XRPL launched a suite of organization-level DeFi tools in the first quarter. Licensed domains, licensed DEX and token custody are all online, while native lending and asset vaults are still in the validator voting stage. Other projects under development include multi-purpose tokens for real-world assets, bulk transactions, and EVM sidechains for programmability. These feature drives are reflected in the data: real-world assets on XRPL reached a record high of US$2.25 billion at the end of Q1, a month-on-month increase of 124%, putting the ledger at the forefront of the tokenized asset network and ranked fourth when Messari released the report. Named publishers include Ondo, OpenEden and Guggenheim.

Ripple is also betting on machine-driven payments. On June 9, it released the XRPL AI Starter Kit and was designated as a launching partner for Mastercard\'s Agent Pay for Machines program; at the same time, XRPL was added to the support chain for the x402 protocol, an open protocol that allows AI agents to pay for services such as APIs and calculations in XRP and RLUSD without manual approval.

In terms of funding, Ripple announced at the end of February that it would shift from a centralized allocation model to a more decentralized model. Since 2017, Ripple has deployed more than $550 million to the XRPL program through nearly 200 projects. The new structure decentralizes decision-making power among multiple groups:

Fintech Builders Program for institutional-level applications such as stablecoin payments, credit and tokenization;

XAO DAO, a hybrid DAO for small grants and voting for the community;

XRPL Commons, an independent agency responsible for managing grants and its nine-week Aquarium incubator in Paris;

the new XRP Asia Center, and the expanded UDAX University cohort in Sao Paulo, Oxford and the University of California at Berkeley, with participating venture capital firms including Pantera, Dragonfly and Franklin Templeton.

Foundations laid in the first half of the year

The regulatory environment improved in the first half of the year. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission jointly classified XRP as a digital commodity in March, easing long-standing legal shadows; the CLARITY bill (which intends to write this identity into federal law) was passed by the Senate Banking Committee on May 14 with a 15:9 vote. Since June 1, the bill has been placed on the Senate agenda and is eligible for a full vote, but no specific voting time has been arranged. The White House\'s original July 4 signing target has been missed, and disputes over ethical rules and stablecoin gains remain unresolved. The Senate will have a short window of time (before August) after its recess, which supporters see as the last practical opportunity this year. Ripple\'s conditional OCC Custody Trust Charter has also made progress.

The clearest signal of Ripple\'s development direction appeared in mid-June. In an interview with Fox Business Channel, CEO Brad Garinhaus said the company expects to achieve an annualized revenue operating rate of US$1 billion by the end of 2026 and explicitly excludes XRP on its balance sheet. This sums up the entire first half: a company that struggled to measure revenue from payments, stablecoins, custody and brokerage businesses, and a token that was still waiting for those efforts to be reflected in price.