The price of XRP barely moved from its price two weeks ago, holding slightly above $1.09, and that’s what makes the current picture so strange. The XRP Ledger is now silent, as the chart above barely teases with any movement. According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Daily Active Addresses reached its second-lowest level of the year in mid-July, and reportedly dipped even lower since then, to around 22,888 per the same data feed. Network Growth: brand new wallets joining the ledger dropped to 2,130 addresses, the lowest since November 2024. According to separate data from Experts, the number of active addresses is closer to 20,000, the same number that the network last reached in nearly a year. If you’ve been watching the charts and wondering why the price looks calm while everything else feels off, this XRP activity decline is exactly what you’re picking up on.
None of that shows up on a price chart. XRP remains stuck, has failed to find any bottom and continues to defend an area it’s been clinging to for weeks. However, the activity drop that has been underpinning the price stability is real, evident by multiple independent data providers and is worth understanding before it resolves quietly or it catches up with the valuation of the token.
The True Measurement of the XRP Activity Decline
While the most talked about is price, it’s a lagging signal. When a token price breaks out in a significant trend, the network it’s built on will usually indicate the change first: an increase in wallet transactions, new addresses being created and a deepening orderbook that takes in size without giving it up. This is why on-chain researchers keep an eye on a certain collection of metrics rather than just the candles.
Daily Active Addresses represent the number of unique wallets that sent/received XRP on a specific day and are the closest approximation of daily users in the crypto world. It quantifies in one number both small retail transfers as well as larger institutional settlement. Network Growth measures the number of new addresses that receive funds for the first time, which is an approximation of new money or users entering the network. Payment volume is the number of payments, or actual account-to-account transfers, seen in ledger explorers like XRPSCAN and is a better indicator of how much people are actually using the platform than wallet creation alone.
When all three indicators are in the down direction together, as they were for much of 2026, it usually means one thing: fewer are doing something with their XRP. Not necessarily selling it. Just not using it. That contrast is found in almost every one of the following data points.
The Numbers Behind the Slowdown
If you pull the individual figures together, a pattern is not difficult to see. According to data from Finbold’s ledger, active accounts on XRPL have dropped by about 51% year-to-date, and the decrease has been quite rapid in the last few days, instead of gradual. The number of payments made from one account to another has fallen to its lowest level this year since 2026.
In miniature, it is the same pattern when you create new addresses. According to the data from Santiment as reported by FXStreet, the network’s users peaked in a single day at approximately 6,600 on June 30, only to plummet to approximately 800 users in about two weeks, which is a very sharp drop for a metric that typically follows a gradual wave. Over a smaller timeframe, addresses actively transacting on the protocol had an even more similar narrative, dropping from some 4,000 to nearly 2,200 in a day or so at one particularly quiet period in mid-July.
It’s not been a linear drop and let’s be precise about that. Price and addresses both spiked around June 15, after a dip-buying spree, which briefly appeared to be a return of interest to the network. The bounce went away in days. A more detailed examination of the wallet data indicates that much of the increased activity was from existing wallets increasing their holdings instead of new wallets being created, as the wallet creation did not align with the improvement in general activity. That is a key point: a network that is truly acquiring new users is a different beast on-chain than a network that is just transacting between the same wallets more frequently.
Spot trading adds to the overall scenario from an alternate perspective. As reported by The Crypto Basic, reveals that Binance’s XRP spot volume declined 54.6% week-over-week in late July and is currently sitting over 67% lower than its monthly and quarterly averages. XRP traded in a very tight range for nearly two weeks within a $1.086 to $1.113 range, which only occurs when buyers and sellers are not showing up in volume.
Activity that was typically better for XRP recently, tokenization, also cooled off in the same window. Transfer volume of real-world assets on the XRP Ledger has plummeted over 80% to approximately $99.5 million in 30 days, and the network’s 30-day stablecoin transfer volume has fallen by as much as 28% to about $3.75 billion. Those numbers represent activity, not the value of the tokens in tokenized products, and it makes a difference. However, back to the value side of the story, it’s very different.
Why Network Activity Is Falling While Whales Keep Buying
Things start to get truly interesting, not just bearish here. As the regular trading volume of wallets has decreased, XRP’s top holders have been doing the exact opposite.
Data from Santiment shared by analyst Ali Martinez revealed wallets with between one million and 10 million XRP gained approximately 70 million XRP between July 11 and July 15, bringing their total to about 3.83 billion XRP. On a broader scale, wallets with 100,000 to 100 million XRP had a 2.8% increase in their combined XRP holdings over the past five weeks, while wallets with less than 0.01 XRP, the lowest retail tier tracked, experienced a 5.2% decline in their combined holdings over the same period. It is as neat a separation as on-chain data can be of large and small holders. But that dichotomy between declining retail jobs and larger institutional-class jobs is not new for this week of July; it’s been the trend for much of this year, if not longer. In our deeper dive into XRP’s switch to capital allocation for 2026, we explored the origins of that capital.
The build-up side of that story fits with exchange reserves. Binance’s XRP holdings have dropped below 2.61 billion tokens since mid-July, which is the lowest since February 2026 and represents a decline from over 3 billion XRP tokens in late 2025. When coins are moving out of exchanges, they typically end up in either self-custody or cold storage, effectively reducing the amount of coins available for sale, and that’s a very different kind of weakness in comparison to what the demand-side weakness is being reflected by the active address counts.
Once you distinguish between what each of the two measures, the two trends are not really in opposition. Active addresses and payment counts show usage and turnover: how many people are using XRP or moving it around and how many are using it for payments on a day-to-day basis. Whale accumulation and exchange outflows, on the other hand, track positioning, or what big players decide to do with coins they are already planning to hold. Indeed, a market may be experiencing less day-to-day activity while the largest players are not taking that into account, but rather are undertaking longer-term positions while they’re at it. The danger is that one trend will offset the other. So, low supply and weak demand can coexist and if the situation is like that, then dropping exchange reserves alone will not have a significant impact on prices, unless real buyers are willing to step in.
PRWP: Price Resilience Against Weakening Participation
But XRP’s price hasn’t reflected the magnitude of the decline in on-chain activity and that difference is its own signal to read. The token is currently trading at approximately $1.09, which is within a range it has largely maintained since rebounding off a 2026 low at nearly $1.01 on June 25. The $1.00 level is obviously the one no one wants to see broken on a daily close, and the $1.05-$1.07 area has been the more immediate bottom over the past few weeks. The positive side of $1.12 has staved off multiple bids for a move higher, with the $1.15 and $1.18-$1.20 range as the next resistance zone in case buyers clear it.
The RSI is currently around the neutral range, as it has been in oversold conditions throughout several periods this year but hasn’t yet been in bull market conditions. Derivatives markets complicate matters further. Despite the crash in volume, the Open Interest of XRP futures reached around $423.8 million, bringing the estimated leverage ratio to the highest level in weeks. By one measure, funding rates have slowed by nearly 30% from the previous week, but remain significantly above their longer-term averages, which is to say that there is no unwinding of leverage in the system; it simply hasn’t been growing.
When that activity of thinning spot and increasing leveraged exposure comes into play, it’s usually a recipe for lower order levels and more volatile price movements when a true catalyst materializes either way. It’s a setup to watch closely, as it only takes a relatively small amount of volume to push the low-liquidity markets around when a trigger appears.
RLUSD, Tokenization, and the Institutional Counter-Story
You could easily think that the XRP Ledger was shrinking if you only saw the number of active addresses and the number of payments. The value side of the ledger makes for a completely different read and it’s worth pausing to reflect on this.
The market capitalization of RLUSD, the stablecoin of Ripple which is deployed on the XRP Ledger, has risen from approximately $235 million at the beginning of 2026 to nearly $896 million, an increase of over $660 million in value over a span of roughly seven months, according to data shared by The Crypto Basic. The distributed real-world assets have increased from $518 million to $1.319 billion in the same timeframe, and with the assets not necessarily distributed to the network but represented, the total tokenized assets reach well over $5 billion. That growth made XRPL short-term one of the top networks for RWA growth in the past 30 days, with the exception of Arbitrum. The distributed-asset number is now about two-thirds RLUSD.
Ripple also has a license under MiCA, which allows it to become a regulated crypto-asset service provider in the European Economic Area, and is still inking infrastructure partnerships with traditional banking operatives. None of that will appear in a Daily Active Addresses chart since institutional settlement and stablecoin issuance do not necessarily result in the rapid wallet turnover on-chain activity metrics are designed to capture.
This is the nuance to the XRP activity down news. The ledger isn’t becoming irrelevant, it’s just that it isn’t as “churny” in the retail sense. A network can become institutionalised and lose casual activity within the same quarter and that’s exactly what seems to be happening with XRP currently. The question remains which of the two will do it more, but in the past it has been institutional flows and regulatory catalysts that have done the job more than the number of addresses using it on any given day.
The CLARITY Act: The Catalyst that Could Change Everything
A lot of the caution that’s in the on-chain information for XRP can be traced back to 1 unsolved query in Washington. The SEC and CFTC jointly classified XRP as a digital commodity through an interpretive release on March 17, 2026, closing out years of legal uncertainty tied to Ripple’s long-running case with the SEC. An interpretive release, however, is not a statute and a new set of regulators might yet overturn it.
That’s where the CLARITY Act comes in. It has gone further than any previous crypto market-structure bill it passed the House 294-134 back in July 2025 and advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 in May 2026 and has been on the Senate calendar since June 1, waiting for a floor vote. Passage requires 60 votes. But the reality is that Republicans will have 53, with Josh Hawley and Rand Paul expected to vote no, leaving only about two Democratic votes and seven to nine more needed.
In late July, what had been the bill’s biggest remaining hurdle was removed when the White House agreed in principle to the ethics protections prohibiting crypto transactions by the president, vice president, and members of Congress while they are in office, which had been sought by the Senate Democrats for months. The details of enforcement are yet to be finalized and at least one Democratic senator has already deemed the first offer “too little, too late. But that’s not to say that prediction markets weren’t busy on the news and moving away from a low probability of passage around 32% this year. If it does not pass before a Senate recess on Aug. 7, this bill is likely to be pushed back to 2027 or a future session.
Here’s why that is significant for activity data in particular. There hasn’t been much appetite within institutional desks, custodians and pension allocators to create any significant XRP infrastructure around a classification that can be reversed by another administration down the road. The clear permanent statutory path is generally considered to be the catalyst that would unleash the next round of ETF inflows, with some analysts speculating amounts as high as $8 billion, and with it, a new round of on-chain activity this time simply not being reflected by current metrics.
Is This Normal for XRP, or Something New?
Context helps here. The latter came with plenty of credible catalysts as XRP had a torrid 2024, with both the Ripple-SEC settlement and early ETF rumors driving institutional interest, which brought in actual new users. Activity and price have been trending in tandem during this period and that is the healthy and expected trend. The standout thing about 2026 is there’s a split. Price has not taken a plunge in tandem with usage, which has declined much more than normal.
It also gives a perspective on how volatile this single indicator has been throughout the year, and not to place too much emphasis on any one reading. It used to be that active addresses would decline by 26% in one week in February, dropping from 55,080 to 40,778, and then see a back-and-forth trend between about 23,000 and 41,000 active addresses depending on the week, all the way through until July and fresh lows. Such a market, viewing merely a single snapshot, might make almost any story it wished. The best indicator is the overall pattern of the year: participation had a series of lows, even as price found a footing.
A big reason for the softness can be attributed to the general market. Altcoins have been mostly in a risk-off mood since the beginning of 2026, with funds either flocking to Bitcoin or waiting on the sidelines for the Federal Reserve to provide clarity. The activity drop of XRP is not unique, but is rather more pronounced than a trend that can be observed throughout the majority of tokens, other than the biggest few. Geopolitical noise from the US-Iran conflict this summer also provided a good excuse for traders to scale back speculative positions overall. If you are trying to read XRP’s moves in the context of the risk-off mood, it is important to understand the same in the context of Bitcoin, which has its own slide from its October 2025 highs. In this article, we explore the real reasons behind the Bitcoin price drop in 2026.
It is also important to note that a decrease in network usage has not always been a dependable indicator for the next price move of XRP. It is not a basis for a breakdown, as the token has rallied during times of low engagement before. What it does affect is the quality of any rally that does show up. Moves with light participation also don’t have much follow-through in maintaining reclaimed levels, due to the limited number of active participants to support the new level when it is claimed.
What Would Reverse the Slowdown
There are a few particular developments you should be monitoring, not simply any particular day’s worth of price action, that could change this trend.
The CLARITY Act is at the top of the list, as it directly addresses institutional reluctance. ETF inflows are another signal to watch for sustained inflows. Following outflows during a portion of July, flows turned modestly positive on July 16 with $6.10 million and again on July 20 $2.27 million and July 21 with $5.09 million before becoming choppy for much of the rest of July. If it continues to gain strength for a few weeks, it could be a sign that institutional demand is finally making a comeback.
It is important that the RLUSD expansion continues as well, especially when adoption begins to translate into actual transactions as opposed to just balances sitting idle in treasury wallets. If it passes the validator voting process, Ripple’s proposed XRPL lending protocol will introduce a new use case, which can incentivize XRP to move off the bench and into active circulation. A general risk-on rally in crypto, which may be driven by the Federal Reserve’s policy easing, is likely to make a more significant impact on XRP’s activity metrics than any XRP-specific headline, by itself.
There are no guarantees about any of this. The CLARITY Act is particularly the real-life ‘heads or tails’ question that could be decided in weeks.
The current situation of XRP
The easiest way to interpret the current data: XRP’s network hasn’t been as patient as its price. Despite the token currently trading within the range it has held for weeks, the number of active addresses, wallet creation, and payments have all dipped to some of their lowest levels of 2026. So that’s the real news story today more than anything else: the price and participation spread.
Whether it will close from a resurgent move or a price move catching down to lower fundamentals remains to be seen, and the answer is that there is no clearly defined data either way yet. The accumulation of whales and the declining exchange reserves point to the more optimistic interpretation. The spot volume and the 51% reduction in active accounts are not encouraging. This is true in both directions and that’s why it’s worth paying attention to, not running down or dismissing.
This article covers on-chain and market data for informational purposes only and isn’t financial or investment advice. The cryptocurrency sector and XRP are very volatile, and traders should conduct their own research or consult a registered financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
