Ripple is expanding fast even as its native token, XRP, has fallen roughly 60% from its July high. The discrepancy highlights a growing disconnect between the company’s corporate progress and the market for its cryptocurrency.
Over the past year Ripple completed a $750 million share buyback at an implied $50 billion valuation and spent nearly $3 billion on acquisitions, including a $1.25 billion purchase of prime brokerage Hidden Road and a $1 billion deal for Treasury platform GTreasury. The company has also continued to sign partnerships with major financial institutions, positioning itself as a provider of enterprise payments infrastructure.
Yet those wins have not translated into demand for XRP. The reason lies in how Ripple’s products actually work. The company sells two main services: a messaging and settlement layer widely adopted by banks that does not use XRP, and a cross-border payments product that can use XRP as a bridge asset. Many headline deals involve the messaging layer, which creates little or no direct buying pressure for the token.
Compounding the problem for XRP is RLUSD, a stablecoin Ripple introduced last year. RLUSD can serve the same bridging role as XRP without exposing institutions to price volatility. Ripple’s own payments page now prominently promotes integration of stablecoin payments, signaling a strategic tilt toward RLUSD for institutional flows. That reduces the practical reasons for banks to hold XRP.
Supply dynamics add further pressure. Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow each month. The company typically relocks 70%–80% of those tokens, but hundreds of millions still enter circulation every month. As of 2026, roughly 38 billion XRP remain in escrow, meaning the monthly drip will continue for years and maintain a significant supply overhang.
Those three factors — product separation, the rise of RLUSD, and persistent token supply — help explain why XRP has lagged even as the parent company grows. Johnny Rice, a contributing writer for The Motley Fool, wrote that Ripple appears to be building “serious global financial infrastructure” but warned that the company’s success may not translate into a stronger long-term outlook for XRP. Rice said RLUSD’s adoption makes it less likely that XRP will capture value created by Ripple’s institutional products.
Investors and market observers still see potential short-term rallies driven by speculation or sector-wide momentum. But the structural issues identified by market watchers suggest that XRP’s price may continue to underperform relative to Ripple’s corporate trajectory unless the company changes its product strategy or escrow policy.
You can read the original article here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/05/16/the-cryptocurrency-xrp-is-down-60-ripple-is-boomin/
