Crypto World
Why Ripple keeps winning while the XRP price falls
A federal bank charter, a European passport, a growing stablecoin, and a ledger upgrade cycle in full swing. The company has never looked stronger. The token is down nearly half this year. The gap between those sentences is the most important question in the XRP market.
Summary
- Ripple’s regulatory and stablecoin wins strengthen the company, but they do not automatically create XRP token demand.
- XRP’s supply pressure, escrow releases, whale selling, and weak ETF demand have kept the chart under pressure.
- RLUSD supports Ripple’s payments business but narrows XRP’s original bridge-asset narrative.
- XRP’s next durable rally likely depends on mechanical demand channels such as lending, burn, escrow reform, and ETF flow recovery.
Picture two screens side by side. On the left, Ripple’s 2026: conditional approval for a national trust bank from the OCC, a stablecoin passport covering 30 European countries, regulatory wins from London to Abu Dhabi, a lending protocol moving through ledger governance, transaction counts on the XRP Ledger at a two-year high, and a quantum-security roadmap stretching confidently to 2028.
On the right, XRP’s 2026: a token that opened the year near $2.10, touched multi-year highs in the spring, and now trades around $1.10 after a week in which it lost roughly 17%, sitting below its 50-day moving average near $1.38 and its 200-day near $1.62.
Six years ago, the explanation would have been easy: the SEC lawsuit was strangling the company, so of course the token suffered.
The lawsuit’s shadow has mostly lifted, the regulatory environment is the friendliest in the asset’s history, and the divergence has only widened.
Holders are asking the question with increasing irritation, and they deserve a better answer than market manipulation memes or bagholder cope.
There is a real answer. It has several parts, none of them flattering to the simple thesis that corporate success must eventually pull the token upward, and a few of them hopeful in ways the frustrated crowd is currently ignoring.
The answer, compressed
Five forces explain the gap, and the rest of this piece unpacks them in order.
First, Ripple’s wins accrue to Ripple’s equity, and XRP is not equity; nothing in a bank charter or a license buys the token.
Second, supply runs on its own clock: the escrow drips up to a billion XRP a month into the market while large early holders have spent the spring selling into every bounce.
Third, the company’s flagship product now competes with the token’s original thesis, because RLUSD does the bridge-asset job without the volatility.
Fourth, the ETF demand channel turned out to be cyclical, chasing strength instead of creating it.
Fifth, a market-wide crash hit a high-beta token with extra sell pressure attached harder than most.
None of these forces is mysterious. What they share is that no press release fixes any of them, and the channels that could—lending, burn, escrow reform—are still under construction.
The win column, taken seriously
Start by giving the left screen its due, because the corporate run is real and remarkable.
In December 2025, the OCC conditionally approved Ripple National Trust Bank, putting a crypto-native company inside the federal banking perimeter and opening a path toward reserves held directly with the Federal Reserve.
In late January 2026, the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority granted an electronic money license; days later, Luxembourg finalized an EMI license that passports RLUSD issuance across the entire European Economic Area under MiCA.
Swiss approval reached advanced review in March. Gulf regulators in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Bahrain signed off on RLUSD for regulated use.
The stablecoin itself crossed $1 billion within 11 months of launch and now holds around $1.5 billion with reserves attested above the float.
The ledger side has been just as busy.
The XLS-65 and XLS-66 amendments, which would build native vaults and fixed-rate lending into the protocol, entered validator voting in January after a $200,000 security Attackathon.
The EVM sidechain has grown to roughly $180 million in locked value.
The core software is being rebranded from Rippled to XRPLd with a major performance release attached, RippleX has begun threading AI through the development pipeline, and a four-phase plan aims to make the ledger quantum-resistant by 2028.
Transactions recently touched their highest levels in two years. Central bank pilots continue to run on Ripple infrastructure. Any one of these items would have produced a double-digit rally in 2021.
In 2026, the market shrugged at all of them. That is not because the market is broken. It is because the market is answering a different question than the one holders are asking.
The question the market is actually answering
The core of it is uncomfortable. Ripple’s wins accrue, first and most directly, to Ripple, a private company whose equity captures the value of its licenses, stablecoin business, and enterprise relationships.
XRP is not equity.
Holding the token gives no claim on Ripple’s revenue, no share of RLUSD’s reserve interest, and no dividend from the trust bank.
The token’s value rests on demand for the token itself: as bridge liquidity, as the ledger’s native asset, as collateral, and as a speculative vehicle.
The implicit thesis behind the divergence frustration is that corporate success must convert into token demand.
Sometimes it does, through real channels this piece will get to.
But the conversion is neither automatic nor proportional, and 2026 has made the gap brutally visible because the corporate wins have come faster than the token-demand channels can absorb.
A bank charter does not buy XRP. A stablecoin passport does not buy XRP. A quantum roadmap does not buy XRP.
Each one makes the company more valuable and the ecosystem more durable, and each one leaves the token’s daily demand-supply balance where it was.
Equity markets understood this distinction long ago, which is why the perennial Ripple IPO chatter cuts deeper than it first appears.
If Ripple ever lists, investors will finally have a direct way to own the win column, and the market will be forced to price, openly, how much of the company’s success the token was ever going to capture. The realistic range of answers starts at less than holders hope.
The announcement rally died of overuse
Some market history explains why the win column stopped working. Half of crypto Twitter still trades as if the old regime were alive, so the story bears retelling in full. From 2017 through 2021, XRP was the announcement-rally token par excellence.
A bank partnership, a new RippleNet corridor, a MoneyGram deal, or an exchange listing in a new country: each headline produced a pop, because the holder base was overwhelmingly retail, the float available on exchanges was thinner, and the surrounding market treated every institutional gesture as confirmation of the bridge-asset destiny.
Traders learned to buy rumors of announcements, then to buy rumors of rumors. The reflex was so reliable that it became infrastructure; entire accounts existed to catalog Ripple partnership hints. Regimes like that die in a specific way.
Each announcement that fails to change the underlying demand for the token teaches a cohort of traders that the pop is for selling, and the selling arrives a little earlier each cycle, until the pop stops forming at all.
The MoneyGram partnership was the canonical lesson: a flagship deal, celebrated for two years, that ended with the disclosure that the partner had been selling the XRP it received as fast as it arrived.
By the time the 2026 win column began stacking up, the market had a decade of training data showing that Ripple’s corporate milestones convert to token demand weakly and slowly when they convert at all.
The OCC charter announcement in December produced barely a candle. That was not apathy. That was memory.
The practical implication runs against instinct: the next durable XRP rally will almost certainly not begin with a Ripple announcement, and a trader waiting for the catalyst headline is watching the wrong screen.
It will begin, if it begins, in the boring data series this piece keeps returning to: vault deposits, burn rates, flow tables, where changes compound quietly long before they trend.
The supply side never sleeps
Demand is only half of any price, and XRP’s supply side runs on a schedule that no corporate achievement alters.
Every month, Ripple’s escrow releases up to one billion XRP, with the unused portion re-locked into new contracts.
In practice only a fraction enters circulation, but the headline figure is what traders price, and the mechanism guarantees a steady drip of potential supply from a single large holder into a market that must absorb it.
Years of debate have not changed the basic optics: the largest beneficiary of XRP sales is the company whose successes holders are waiting to be paid for.
Watchers have pressed for a more transparent release regime, and the CLARITY Act’s progress has revived speculation that disclosure standards might force one.
Until then, every rally runs into the same arithmetic. The nearer-term pressure has come from whales.
On-chain trackers through late spring flagged sustained distribution from large wallets, with sizeable cohorts selling into every bounce, and the past week’s slide came with whale selling named repeatedly as the proximate cause.
Some of that is profit-taking from addresses that accumulated in 2024 at a fraction of current prices, behavior that is rational, predictable, and indifferent to press releases.
Distribution of this kind ends in one of two ways: sellers exhaust, or demand arrives that absorbs them. The win column produces neither directly. A caution on reading all this.
A falling price during heavy distribution tells you about the sellers’ positioning, not about the asset’s prospects, and conflating the two is how investors talk themselves out of positions at lows and into them at highs.
The current chart is ugly. The current chart is also exactly what a transfer from early large holders to a wider base looks like, when it is that. The data cannot yet say which it is.
The IPO wildcard cuts both ways
Hovering over all of this is the listing question, which resurfaces every quarter and usually gets argued with less precision than it needs.
An eventual Ripple IPO would be a genuine event for the token, in two opposite directions at once. The supportive direction runs through disclosure.
A public Ripple must publish audited financials, and audited financials would put hard numbers on things the XRP market has guessed about for a decade: the size and pace of XRP sales, the carrying value of the company’s holdings, the actual revenue contribution of products that use the token versus products that bypass it.
Forced transparency would close the trust discount that escrow opacity built, and a successful listing would carry validation effects no private milestone can match, with the equity’s reception telling the world how serious institutions price the whole Ripple complex.
The adverse direction runs through substitution. Every investor who wanted exposure to Ripple’s regulatory empire and bought XRP for lack of an alternative would suddenly have the real thing.
The token’s role as a proxy for the company, always analytically wrong but behaviorally real, would end on listing day, and demand built on that proxy logic would migrate to the stock.
Circle’s market history offers the template: its IPO gave investors a direct claim on stablecoin economics, and nobody needed to hold a token to participate.
The likeliest net effect is a repricing in which XRP trades more purely on its own mechanical demand, which is healthy in the long run and could be violent in the short run, in either direction, depending on what the disclosures reveal.
No filing exists, and post-CLARITY rules would shape the timing.
But the scenario belongs in any serious map of the divergence, because it is the one event that would force the market to answer, in public and with money, exactly how much of the win column the token was ever entitled to.
The stablecoin ate the story
There is a deeper, slower force underneath the supply mechanics, and it is the one the XRP community least enjoys discussing. RLUSD competes with the original XRP thesis.
The bridge-asset argument that powered every XRP bull case since 2017 held that institutions moving money across borders would prefer a fast, neutral intermediary asset over pre-funded foreign accounts.
The argument was sound. What it did not anticipate was that the winning intermediary might be a stablecoin: an asset with the same settlement speed, on the same ledger, with none of the volatility that makes treasurers flinch.
Ripple built that asset itself, wrapped it in more licenses than any competitor, and now leads its corporate communication with it.
Inside Ripple’s payment flows, the two assets do cooperate, with XRP providing bridge liquidity in thin corridors while RLUSD provides the stable leg.
But at the level of narrative, the company’s regulatory triumphs of 2026 are stablecoin triumphs, and every one of them strengthens the case that regulated tokenized dollars, not volatile bridge assets, are what institutional payments were waiting for.
The market is not stupid. It watched the company’s center of gravity move and repriced the token’s role accordingly.
This, more than any single sale or unlock, explains why announcements that would once have ignited the chart now pass through it.
The announcements are about a future in which XRP’s job description has narrowed. The token keeps the ledger’s fee and anti-spam functions, its DEX and collateral roles, and its bridge niche in exotic corridors.
Those are real. They are simply smaller than the world-reserve-bridge dream that old prices were built on, and markets reprice dreams without sentimentality.
The ETF era arrived, and it was not enough
Spot XRP ETFs were supposed to be the demand channel that finally connected institutional interest to the token itself, and their story this year is a microcosm of the whole divergence.
The products exist now, after the post-lawsuit regulatory thaw turned filings into listings.
Flows through their first stretch have been positive but modest, a topic this publication has covered in depth, and nothing close to the Bitcoin ETF tidal wave that the most excited projections borrowed their math from.
The shortfall is informative. Bitcoin ETFs succeeded because they let a vast, pre-existing pool of fiduciary money express a view it already held.
XRP ETFs offer access to a view that institutions, evidently, hold with less conviction, and access without conviction produces shelf space, not flows.
Spring’s price action made the problem circular. ETF allocators chase strength and momentum. A token down sharply on the year with visible whale distribution gives a portfolio committee every reason to wait, and their waiting removes the bid that would have stopped the slide.
None of this makes the ETF channel worthless. It makes it cyclical, a demand amplifier that will matter enormously in the next genuine uptrend and contributes little during a markdown.
The steady institutional bid arrives when the price story improves, which is backwards from what holders hoped ETFs would do.
The macro made everything worse
Fairness requires the context that XRP’s slide did not happen in a vacuum.
The broader crypto market has spent recent weeks in a brutal selloff, with hundreds of billions wiped from total capitalization, Ethereum dragged toward levels not seen in years, and Bitcoin well off its highs even as equity markets sat near records.
The decoupling of crypto from stocks has been one of the stranger features of the season, and it has hit high-beta large caps like XRP harder than the leaders.
XRP’s relationship with Bitcoin this year has been its own study in decoupling.
Through the spring, the token traded its own calendar of legal and regulatory catalysts, sometimes rallying against a flat market, which felt like strength.
The same independence cuts the other way in a downturn: idiosyncratic supply pressure means XRP can fall harder than its beta predicts, and the past month delivered it, with the token breaking the $1.20 to $1.25 support zone that had held through earlier scares and probing toward the $1.05 to $1.10 region that technicians flag as the next meaningful floor.
The concentration of XRP’s spot volume on Asian retail venues, particularly in South Korea and Japan, adds a final amplifier.
Retail-heavy order books are momentum machines in both directions, quick to chase highs and quick to abandon support, and they make XRP’s drawdowns sharper than its institutional-era story would suggest.
The microstructure of who actually trades this token has changed far less than the company behind it.
What Ripple itself could do tomorrow
One actor in this story has tools nobody else holds, and the discussion rarely puts them on the table plainly.
Ripple could publish a binding, transparent escrow release policy: fixed schedules, advance disclosure of intended sales, and reporting that lets the market price supply instead of fearing it.
The cost would be flexibility; the benefit would be retiring the single oldest discount on the asset.
Hyperliquid showed the opposite lever in 2025, showing the whole industry how mechanically routing protocol revenue into open-market token purchases can re-anchor a price to a business.
While Ripple’s corporate structure makes a direct copy awkward, nothing prevents the company from committing a defined slice of payments or stablecoin revenue to programmatic XRP acquisition for operational reserves.
Even a modest, audited program would invert the market’s core assumption that the company is a permanent net seller of the asset its community holds.
The fact that none of this has happened is itself information. Ripple’s incentives point toward funding the regulatory land grab, and selling escrowed XRP remains the cheapest funding desk on earth.
Holders waiting for the company to defend the chart are waiting for it to act against its own treasury logic, which companies do rarely and only when the asset’s weakness starts costing them something they value more: ecosystem credibility, validator goodwill, or an IPO narrative.
Watch for that pain threshold. The day defending XRP becomes cheaper for Ripple than ignoring it is the day the win column finally gets a direct conduit to the price, and that day is more likely to be chosen in a boardroom than discovered on a chart.
The channels that could reconnect company and token
Diagnosis without prognosis is just complaint. The constructive version is a list of specific, watchable channels through which the win column could start paying the chart.
The first is the lending protocol. If XLS-65 and XLS-66 activate and vault deposits grow, XRP gains its first native yield and its first protocol-level supply sink.
Locked tokens earning underwritten credit yield are tokens off the order books, and the analyst threshold of $500 million in vault value is a reasonable line for when the effect becomes visible.
The second is fee burn at scale. Every XRPL transaction destroys a sliver of XRP; transaction counts at two-year highs make the burn real but still tiny, and only an order-of-magnitude rise in ledger activity, of the kind tokenization and lending could bring, turns it into a pricing factor.
The third is escrow reform. A credible move to a transparent, rules-based release schedule, whether volunteered or regulation-forced, would remove the single largest standing discount on the asset.
The fourth is the ETF flywheel reversing polarity, which requires a price uptrend to start it but compounds once started.
The four channels share one trait. Each converts ecosystem activity into token demand mechanically, without requiring anyone to believe a narrative.
That is the actual lesson of 2026 for XRP: narrative channels are exhausted, mechanical channels are under construction, and the chart will reconnect with the company when the mechanics, not the press releases, say so.
Reading the divergence honestly
The divergence supports two readings: a broken token attached to a thriving company, or a mispriced one.
The bearish reading is coherent. The company’s success has migrated to assets and business lines that holders do not own, supply pressure is structural and scheduled, the flagship demand thesis was partially cannibalized in-house, and the token now trades as a high-beta large cap with extra sell pressure attached.
Under this reading, the divergence is not an anomaly to be corrected but a discovery of how things always were, and rallies are for selling until a mechanical demand channel proves itself at scale.
The bullish reading is also coherent, and it is not cope.
Ripple is constructing the most heavily regulated financial stack in crypto, every layer of it runs on a ledger whose native asset is XRP, and the conversion channels—lending, burn, collateral, ETF flows—are months rather than years from testable.
Prices set during indiscriminate whale distribution and a market-wide crash are the worst possible estimate of what a demand structure will look like after those channels open.
Under this reading, 2026 is the year the market punished XRP for the gap between announcement and mechanism, and the punishment is creating the entry that the mechanism era will reward.
What a careful observer cannot do is split the difference lazily.
The two readings make different predictions on visible timelines: vault deposit growth, burn rates, escrow policy, ETF flow direction.
Within two or three quarters, the data will start choosing between them.
Until then, the only defensible position is the uncomfortable one: the company’s win column is real, the chart’s verdict is real, and the bridge between them is under construction with no completion date on the permit.
As of June 11, 2026. Prices and on-chain figures move quickly; verify current data before trading. This article is information, not investment advice.
Crypto World
Strategy Buys 1,587 Bitcoin for $100M Below Its Blended Cost Basis, Lifting Stack to 846,842 BTC
Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 1,587 bitcoin for about $100 million last week, its first purchase disclosed since the firm broke a multi-year buying streak with a small sale in late May. The latest coins came in well below the average price Strategy has paid to build the largest corporate bitcoin… Read the full story at The Defiant
Bipartisan negotiations on the CLARITY Act fractured on two fronts simultaneously last week. A closed-door ethics session collapsed Tuesday without agreement, and a White House-convened law enforcement meeting on Section 604 ended Wednesday with no resolution.
According to Fox Business correspondent Eleanor Terrett, the July 4 passage deadline is logistically dead. With only 31 Senate session days remaining before the August recess and a 60-vote threshold still to clear, the bill now faces a structural coalition problem.
The CLARITY Act cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee 15–9 on May 14, making it the furthest-advanced piece of crypto regulation in this Congress. That progress masked two fault lines that were never actually closed at the committee stage.
Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio
Ethics Enforcement Mechanism Collapses as White House Pulls Back
Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Ruben Gallego, Bernie Moreno, and Cynthia Lummis met on Tuesday alongside White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt. It is reported that they negotiated a provision that would have authorized state attorneys general to initiate civil actions against the DOJ.
Republicans and Witt withdrew support for that mechanism and offered a substitute limiting enforcement authority to the U.S. Attorney General. It’s an offer Democrats rejected as functionally circular, given that the AG serves at the president’s pleasure. Republicans also floated impeachment as a remedy for presidential ethics violations, which Democrats likewise declined.
The provision was a direct response to Trump crypto exposure: Trump family ventures, including World Liberty Financial and associated token issuances, have generated an estimated $2.3 billion across holdings per widely cited public disclosure estimates.
— Crypto Rover (@cryptorover) April 14, 2026
BREAKING:
Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin Introduces Bill to Invoke 25th Amendment Against Trump pic.twitter.com/xhKv3GBQUu
The White House’s reversal on the state AG enforcement clause reflects a judgment that any provision creating a litigation pathway through state-level Democratic attorneys general carries open-ended political liability regardless of how narrowly it is drafted.
This collapse directly reopens the fault line left unresolved during the May 14 markup, when a Van Hollen amendment barring the president, vice president, and members of Congress from issuing or promoting digital commodities failed 13–11 on party lines.
Senators Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, the two Democrats whose committee votes produced the bill’s nominal bipartisan margin, have both conditioned their floor support on strong ethics provisions, a bar that Tuesday’s walkback made harder to clear, not easier.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
Passage Window Narrows Toward Clarity Act Closure
Eleanor Terrett confirmed that the bill cannot logistically pass Congress by July 4 because it still requires 60 Senate votes, House-Senate reconciliation, and a presidential signature. Coverage tracking the CLARITY Act’s escalating timeline pressure heading into this week underscored how quickly the political window was narrowing.
Prediction markets had previously priced passage above 70%; estimates have since dropped to 45%. The stablecoin yield dispute was previously resolved via a Tillis-Alsobrooks deal, but the ethics and Section 604 tracks remain live and are now fractured simultaneously.
If neither resolves before the August recess, the practical window for 2026 crypto regulation passage may close entirely. The pattern of regulatory deadline pressure is not unique to the Senate: MiCA’s July 1 compliance deadline illustrates how compressed regulatory timelines routinely force markets to price in binary outcomes with limited runway for correction.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post CLARITY Act July 4 Deadline Dead as Ethics and Section 604 Talks Collapse appeared first on Cryptonews.
Ripple’s cross-border token continues to make headlines today, as its price has been on a consistent uptrend that lasted hours and peaked at almost $1.30 minutes ago.
The latest more bullish development came earlier today when a major crypto exchange listed the company’s stablecoin, which also includes a pair against XRP.
XRP’s Bullish Move
CryptoPotato listed several reasons earlier today why the popular altcoin took the market-wide revival by storm. At the time, the asset had climbed to just $1.20 on the heels of the new deal between the US and Iran announced by US President Donald Trump, which is supposed to be signed officially by the end of the week.
The other notable reasons included a substantial shift in exchange deposits as Korea emerged as a winner, and the continuous net inflows into the spot XRP ETFs.
Gate.io, one of the largest and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, added fuel to the bullish fire earlier today by listing RLUSD, Ripple’s other token. Moreover, it added support for XRP/RLUSD on its platform, thus combining both of the company’s assets.
$RLUSD is now live on @Gate_io.$XRP / $RLUSD spot trading pairs are available today, unlocking real interoperability and capital efficiency for digital asset markets worldwide. https://t.co/HHQnfhcMFc
— Ripple (@Ripple) June 15, 2026
Strong Support Continues
The analytics company Santiment also weighed in on XRP’s impressive performance, indicating that today’s surge came after the asset’s sentiment had fallen to multi-month lows. As the analysts have noted countless times in the past, such instances usually offer the most solid trend reversal opportunities.
Furthermore, they explained that the cross-border token continues to benefit from receiving support from its largest holders.
“Our on-chain data indicates that wallets holding at least 1M XRP now hold 74.1% of the entire supply and have accumulated an additional 1.53B coins in just the past six months,” they added.
The analysis also highlights “Ripple’s expanding institutional payment network and growing tokenization initiatives on the XRP Ledger, both of which have helped maintain long-term confidence despite recent price weakness.”
They concluded that when the aforementioned factors align, the price revivals are typically rapid and impressive.
The post Major Ripple Adoption News Sends XRP’s Price Flying to $1.3 appeared first on CryptoPotato.
The majority of the Ripple USD stablecoin is on Ethereum, the top competitor to Ripple’s XRP Ledger.
Indeed, $879 million of the roughly $1.63 billion worth of tokens in circulation sits on Ethereum versus $760 million on the XRP Ledger, a 53-to-47 split in Ethereum’s favor.
Ripple markets its dollar-pegged stablecoin as a flagship of the XRP Ledger’s enterprise readiness, yet an entirely different blockchain minted the majority of the supply.
RLUSD launched in December 2024 with an impressive-sounding New York State Department of Financial Services license.
Unable to fulfill its launch on just the XRPL, Ripple issued tokens natively on two blockchains, pitching XRP as the “home” venue even though Ethereum has hosted the majority of the tokens.
By October 2025, roughly 88% of RLUSD supply lived on Ethereum, with just $91 million on XRPL.
Although Ethereum has ceded some of its dominance to XRPL over the past eight months, XRPL remains in second place.
By the end of 2025, Ethereum’s share was still 81%, roughly $1 billion against $235 million on XRPL. Today, after 18 months of work, XRPL has worked itself up to a 47% share.
Ethereum has the users
On Ethereum, Ripple USD is useful on DeFi applications that dwarf comparable DeFi on XRPL.
For example, Ripple put RLUSD into the Aave V3 lending market in April 2025, where users may deposit it for yield or borrow it for a fee collateralized by other Ethereum-based digital assets.
By late 2025, nearly two-thirds of all RLUSD had been deposited into Aave. RLUSD once ranked as the largest single asset in the protocol’s institutional Horizon market.
Curve and Morpho, other DeFi platforms, also vault hundreds of millions more of Ethereum-based RLUSD.
The transaction record also points to the success of Ripple USD on Ethereum.
RLUSD transfer volume hit a record $18.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, most of which was not XRPL transactions. Instead, Ethereum provided a larger, wealthier community of DeFi users with deeper liquidity pools.
XRP, the token that fans of XRPL can purchase, captures almost none of the value of RLUSD dominance slowly transitioning away from Ethereum.
Every RLUSD transfer on the XRP Ledger burns a fee of approximately one hundred thousandth of 1 XRP, an amount worth less than $0.0001.
Despite Ripple’s marketing of RLUSD as an institutional settlement token with its home on XRPL, XRP tokenholders enjoy a reduction of supply measured in fractions of fractions of a cent for those settlements.
Read more: Years of hype but still no deal: SWIFT sidesteps XRP again
Ripple’s multi-chain success story for Ethereum
Of course, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has long argued that finance will run across many blockchains. The company even enlisted the Wormhole cross-blockchain bridge to push RLUSD onto Ethereum layer-2 networks like Coinbase’s Base.
Reserves for the stablecoin are blockchain agnostic, sitting off-chain with the Bank of New York Mellon, which Ripple named as a primary custodian in July 2025.
As of writing time, XRP is trading at $1.27, down 31% from where it started 2026 and 41% over the last year.
The clearest growth story in Ripple’s orbit is a stablecoin whose largest home is Ethereum, the network XRP had hoped to displace.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
XRP price is moving again, and this time, prediction and volume back it up. The token has run 10% in the past 24 hours, pushing through a sequence of resistance levels that had capped the price for weeks, as the total crypto market cap presses toward $2.4 trillion in a risk-on session.
The bullish structure is forming on the XRP chart, and this is something that makes us reassess upside targets that seemed aggressive just days ago.
The breakout was not subtle. XRP climbed from $1.14 to $1.24 today, with volume spiking to 107.6 million XRP at 21:00 UTC. It’s the strongest print since the early-June washout. South Korea’s Upbit accounted for 31% of XRP wallet-flow dominance by June 14, up sharply from 13% a week earlier, showing concentrated Asian demand driving the initial thrust.
#XRP IS GOING BIZZARE IN SOUTH KOREA! — ᴛᴏᴍ ʟᴀʀᴇꜱᴄᴀ | ᴄʀʏᴘᴛᴏ ᴠɪᴄᴇ
Upbit just recorded $1.94 BILLION in XRP volume in a single hour!
BULLISH !!!! pic.twitter.com/XpO7pVJkA6
(@cryptovicetom) June 15, 2026
Simultaneously, the cumulative net inflows into XRP ETF products have now reached approximately $1.4 billion since launch. Can XRP sustain the volume? Is XRP price prediction getting bullish now?
Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio
XRP Price Prediction: $3.00 Soon?
XRP is trading around $1.24 with a 10% daily gain. Intraday highs during the latest surge touched the $1.25 range. The run above the resistance is characteristic of a market that was underpositioned on the long side. Those who tried to catch short got squeezed, and the cascade accelerated the move.
Technically, the key structural shift came when XRP cleared $1.2 on heavy volume, confirming a bull-flag breakout and flipping what had been overhead supply into near-term support.
Immediate support zones now sit at $1.2, with deeper structure at $1.18 on higher timeframes. Resistance bands to clear are $1.3–$1.32 first, then the more significant $1.5 zone that would confirm a larger trend reversal rather than just a relief rally.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as XRP Trying to Break Resistance
XRP’s 10% run is real, but at a $77 billion market cap, the math on a 10x from here requires a thesis most institutions aren’t ready to rubber-stamp yet. Traders hunting asymmetric upside are increasingly scanning earlier-stage infrastructure plays where the valuation hasn’t already priced in success.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is one project drawing attention in that context. It’s positioning as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) integration, targeting the core limitations holding Bitcoin back: slow throughput, high fees, and the absence of programmable smart contracts.
The architecture delivers sub-second finality and low-cost execution while preserving Bitcoin’s underlying security model through a Decentralized Canonical Bridge for BTC transfers.
The presale has raised $32 million at a current token price of $0.0136, with staking available for early participants.
Research Bitcoin Hyper at the official presale page before the presale ends.
The post XRP Price Prediction: Ripple Jumps 10% as Crypto Total Market Cap Closing $2.4T appeared first on Cryptonews.
BitMine Immersion Technologies has continued adding to its Ethereum position despite a persistent downturn in crypto markets. In a report filed on Monday, the crypto treasury company said it purchased 76,881 ETH over the prior week, further lowering (or at least supporting) its overall cost basis as Ether moved in a volatile range during that period.
The acquisition brings BitMine’s total holdings to 5,620,754 ETH, with an average purchase price of $1,718. While the company has been steadily accumulating through bearish conditions, the scale of its exposure means the treasury remains deeply sensitive to ETH price swings—especially as its strategy relies on both asset ownership and staking-related yield.
Key takeaways
- BitMine bought 76,881 ETH in the last week, bringing holdings to 5,620,754 ETH at an average cost of $1,718.
- At around Monday’s reported market price of $1,843.69, BitMine’s ETH portfolio is valued near $10.2 billion, with an estimated unrealized loss close to $9 billion.
- BitMine controls about 4.66% of ETH’s circulating supply and is moving closer to its stated 5% target (based on 120.68 million circulating ETH).
- The company has staked more than 4.1 million ETH, generating recurring rewards that can continue even when spot prices weaken.
- Ethereum’s environment is under strain not only from price performance but also from structural concerns around layer-2 economics and Ethereum Foundation departures.
BitMine keeps accumulating as ETH trades below prior levels
According to BitMine’s Monday disclosure, the treasury added 76,881 ETH over the preceding week. The purchases took place during a period when Ether briefly dipped below $1,600, according to Cointelegraph’s reference to price action. The broader point, as emphasized by the company’s ongoing behavior, is that accumulation has continued regardless of whether ETH is rebounding or falling.
As of the latest reporting, BitMine’s average acquisition price stands at $1,718. At the time CoinMarketCap data was referenced (Ether trading at $1,843.69 on Monday), the company’s ETH stash was estimated at roughly $10.2 billion.
That figure also highlights the trade-off inherent in a long-duration treasury approach: DropsTab data cited in the report indicates BitMine is sitting on an unrealized loss of nearly $9 billion at current prices. For investors watching large-ETH holders, this matters because it illustrates how treasury strategies can be simultaneously yield-oriented (through staking) and mark-to-market exposed when market conditions deteriorate.
Approaching a “large holder” milestone—while staking supplies yield
BitMine’s latest purchases bring it closer to a stated ambition: owning 5% of Ethereum’s total circulating supply. Based on the cited circulating figure of 120.68 million ETH, the company controls approximately 4.66% after the most recent acquisition.
Just as important is the company’s staking footprint. The report notes that BitMine has staked more than 4.1 million ETH, worth about $8.1 billion at current prices at the time of writing. Staking allows the treasury to earn protocol rewards by helping secure the Ethereum network, creating a more stable stream of yield compared with holding un-staked assets.
In practice, that means BitMine’s economics are not tied purely to whether ETH spot rises or falls. Even during weaker price periods, staking rewards can partially offset losses—though they do not remove the underlying exposure to ETH’s market price.
ETFs face outflows as Ethereum’s broader fundamentals come under scrutiny
BitMine’s accumulation is unfolding amid a wider backdrop that has been difficult for Ethereum-related products. The article links the treasury’s pressure to this year’s selloff in digital asset prices, pointing to spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that recorded four consecutive days of net outflows “last week.” It also notes that selling pressure has persisted since early May, with daily net outflows exceeding $60 million on several occasions.
In the US market, BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) is cited as the largest US-listed ETH ETF, with net assets of $4.75 billion. The filing is described as representing 2.36% of crypto’s circulating supply, with its trend referenced via SoSoValue charts.
The key tension for readers is that large-scale accumulation by a treasury entity does not automatically translate into improved ETF demand or stronger near-term flows. ETF outflows can signal that many investors remain focused on risk reduction or wait-and-see positioning, even as some participants continue adding to long-term holdings.
Beyond price: layer-2 fee dynamics and Ethereum Foundation turnover
While spot performance and fund flows matter, the report argues that Ethereum also faces structural uncertainties. One concern raised is the effect of Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling strategy. As more transaction activity moves to layer-2 networks, the Ethereum mainnet captures less transaction-fee revenue and burns less ETH. Since parts of Ethereum’s monetary narrative are tied to fee burning, reduced burn could weaken deflationary dynamics relative to prior expectations.
Separately, the article points to internal changes at the Ethereum Foundation. It says that at least nine senior leaders, researchers, and core contributors have departed the nonprofit so far this year—described as one of the largest waves of talent attrition in its history. The departures are framed as coinciding with an organizational overhaul and renewed community debate over Ethereum Foundation governance, strategic direction, and its long-term role in the ecosystem.
For market participants, this type of organizational churn can matter less for day-to-day price moves and more for expectations around development priorities and execution risk—especially in a period where scaling, fee capture, and long-term network economics are already being debated.
What to watch next
BitMine’s next disclosures will be important to monitor for changes in acquisition pace and how much of its growing ETH exposure remains staked. At the same time, Ethereum investors should keep an eye on ETF flow trends and the evolving debate around layer-2 economics—alongside any further transparency around Ethereum Foundation staffing and governance—as these factors collectively shape confidence in the network’s longer-run trajectory.
TLDR:
- Zebec launched enterprise payroll on Stellar with support for stablecoin salary distributions globally.
- European institutions have entered final testing for payroll, benefits, and contractor payment workflows.
- Workers can access salaries instantly through wallets, payment cards, or local currency conversions.
- XLM gained over 22% in 24 hours as Stellar ecosystem activity and trading volumes increased.
Zebec has launched its enterprise payroll platform on Stellar, extending blockchain-based salary payments to one of the industry’s largest payment-focused networks. The deployment introduces real-time payroll capabilities for employers managing global teams and contractor networks.
Companies can now distribute salaries in stablecoins while workers gain instant access to funds through digital wallets and payment cards. The rollout comes as Stellar’s native token records heightened market activity and a sharp rise in trading volume.
Zebec Payroll on Stellar Targets Global Enterprise Payments
The launch introduces Zebec’s payroll infrastructure directly onto the Stellar network. According to information shared by Stellar, employers can stream salaries and contractor payments in stablecoins through the platform.
Employees can receive funds instantly in supported digital wallets. They can also spend balances using Zebec’s Mastercard-powered cards or convert digital dollars into local currencies.
The company also unveiled a redesigned enterprise dashboard. The interface targets HR departments managing large international workforces and contractor networks.
Several European institutions and multinational employers have entered final testing stages, according to details released by Zebec. These organizations are evaluating salary distribution, contractor payments, and employee benefits workflows.
The testing phase represents one of the first large-scale evaluations of Zebec’s payroll infrastructure on Stellar. The deployments focus on real-world payment operations rather than experimental blockchain applications.
Zebec stated that the rollout builds on its existing relationship with Stellar. The company highlighted Stellar’s growing role in blockchain-based payment infrastructure and cross-border financial services.
Stellar Ecosystem Growth Coincides With XLM Market Activity
The payroll deployment arrives during a period of increased activity across the Stellar ecosystem. Stellar highlighted the launch through its official social media channels, emphasizing instant payment capabilities for workers and contractors.
The network has attracted attention through payment-focused initiatives connecting traditional financial services with blockchain infrastructure. Zebec referenced Stellar’s work in remittances and institutional blockchain adoption as part of the broader collaboration.
The launch also supports Zebec’s wider multichain expansion strategy. The company continues to deploy payment and payroll infrastructure across multiple blockchain networks while focusing on enterprise compliance requirements.
Market activity surrounding Stellar has also accelerated. According to data from CoinGecko, XLM traded around $0.22 after gaining more than 22% over the previous 24 hours.
Trading volume climbed above $813 million during the same period. The token also moved within a daily range between approximately $0.18 and $0.23.
The payroll announcement arrived alongside that increase in trading activity. While the launch and price movement occurred during the same period, the available data does not establish a direct relationship between the two developments.
The deployment adds another enterprise-focused use case to Stellar’s payments ecosystem as organizations continue evaluating blockchain-based payroll operations.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has hired a new chief data innovation officer with deep experience in blockchain forensics in what could be seen as the regulator’s move toward greater focus on the technology.
In a Monday notice, CFTC Chair Michael Selig said that Donald Battle, an adviser to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) crypto task force, would be the commission’s chief data innovation officer. Battle was appointed as an SEC crypto task force adviser in January 2025 with the incoming Trump administration, and previously worked as a blockchain data adviser for the CFTC and crypto enforcement specialist with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Source: CFTC
Selig cited Battle’s experience in “data science, blockchain forensics, programming interfaces, and cutting-edge AI solutions” among his reasons for his pick.
The appointment signaled the agency moving closer to addressing crypto regulation and enforcement at a time when Congress is seeking to overhaul the CFTC’s and SEC’s roles with a digital asset market structure bill, the CLARITY Act.
The CFTC chair remains the sole commissioner at the financial agency responsible for many aspects of digital asset regulation and enforcement. Under Selig, the CFTC has claimed exclusion jurisdiction over regulating prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, resulting in many lawsuits against state-level authorities seeking to crack down on what they called illegal gambling.
Related: Kraken rolls out perpetual futures for US traders through CFTC-regulated venue
Public comment period opens for proposed CFTC framework on sports event contracts
The CFTC last week released a proposed rule that could distinguish sports event contracts offered on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket from what it called “games of random chance,” referring to gambling. The public has 45 days to comment on the draft rule that could influence how the financial agency addresses regulation of sports events contracts and betting at the state and federal levels.
Magazine: Bitcoin, the ‘canary in the coal mine,’ XRP transaction demand falls 91.5%: Market Moves
After a relatively quiet weekend, bitcoin’s price rose on Sunday evening to $66,000 for the first time in almost two weeks, following US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the deal with Iran is essentially complete.
The total crypto market cap has added over $50 billion daily, going past $2.330 trillion on CG, as many alts have produced impressive gains.
BTC Touched $66K
Bitcoin crashed and burned at the start of June, dropping from $73,000 to a multi-month low of $59,100 before it finally found some support and began its gradual recovery. The following week was somewhat more positive, as BTC jumped toward $64,000 on several occasions but was stopped at each attempt to break through.
The subsequent rejections, driven mostly by macro factors like new attacks in the Middle East, resulted in price dips to $61,000. Nevertheless, that support level held, and BTC rebounded toward the upper boundary of its sideways channel.
The past weekend was quite sluggish, even though Trump promised on Saturday that the US and Iran would announce a permanent deal on Sunday, but there were more attacks from Israel against Lebanon on that day. On Sunday evening, though, came the long-anticipated announcement, with Trump stating on Truth Social that the deal was essentially complete.
BTC reacted with an immediate price pump, going to $66,000 earlier this morning for the first time since June 3. It has lost a few hundred dollars since then, but it’s still 2% up on the day. Its market cap has surged to $1.315 trillion, while its dominance over the alts remains above 56.5% on CG.
Alts Rebound
Most larger-cap alts are well in the green today. Ethereum has reclaimed the $1,700 level after a 2.5% increase. BNB is close to $620, while XRP has exceeded $1.18. SOL is well above $70, while ADA has pumped by 6%.
HYPE is up by almost 10%, and ZEC has risen the most from the top 100 alts. The privacy coin has gained 16% and trades close to $500. WLD follows suit, as a 15% increase has driven it to $0.59. NEAR and JUP complete the double-digit price gainers club.
The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets is up by just over $50 billion daily to $2.330 trillion as of now on CG.
The post HYPE, ZEC Explode After Peace Deal Announcement, BTC Taps 12-Day High: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has appointed SEC crypto task force adviser Donald Battle as chief data innovation officer as lawmakers continue debating the future of U.S. digital asset regulation.
Summary
- CFTC appoints SEC crypto task force adviser Donald Battle as chief data innovation officer.
- Battle brings experience in blockchain forensics, AI, data science, and crypto enforcement.
- The appointment comes as the CFTC defends prediction markets and Congress debates the CLARITY Act.
According to a Monday announcement from CFTC Chair Michael Selig, Donald Battle will serve as the agency’s new chief data innovation officer.
Battle most recently advised the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto task force and previously held roles at the CFTC and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
In the announcement, Selig pointed to Battle’s background in data science, blockchain forensics, application programming interfaces, and artificial intelligence as factors behind the appointment.
Battle joined the SEC crypto task force in January 2025 after the Trump administration took office and has worked on cryptocurrency-related investigations and analytics across multiple federal agencies.
The hire comes as lawmakers in Washington continue work on the CLARITY Act, legislation that would redefine the responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC in overseeing digital assets. While Congress debates those jurisdictional boundaries, the CFTC has remained deeply involved in both crypto-related enforcement and prediction market regulation.
CFTC expands focus on digital asset oversight
Responsibility for many of the agency’s digital asset activities currently rests with the CFTC, which, under Selig, has taken an active role in disputes involving federally regulated event contracts and prediction markets.
Court filings cited by the commission show the agency recently sued New Mexico after state officials attempted to apply local gaming laws to contracts listed on prediction market platform Kalshi. The lawsuit names Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Attorney General Raúl Torrez, and other state officials.
According to the complaint, the CFTC argues that federally regulated event contracts fall under its authority and cannot be governed by state gambling rules.
The case followed allegations from New Mexico authorities that Kalshi was operating without a required license and allowing participation by users younger than the state’s legal gaming age of 21.
Federal regulators have made similar arguments in other disputes involving prediction markets, maintaining that contracts listed on platforms operating under CFTC oversight should be regulated at the federal level.
Sports contract proposal enters public review
At the same time, the commission has opened a public consultation process on a proposed framework covering sports event contracts.
According to the CFTC, the draft rule seeks to distinguish sports event contracts offered by platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket from what the agency described as games of random chance.
The proposal could play a key role in determining how federal regulators treat sports-related prediction markets and how those markets interact with state gaming laws.
The commission said the public will have 45 days to submit comments on the proposal before regulators consider next steps.
Battle’s arrival places a veteran blockchain investigator inside the agency’s data leadership team as the commission navigates overlapping debates involving crypto markets, prediction platforms, and the future division of authority between federal regulators.
With Congress still considering market structure legislation, the CFTC continues to play a central role in several of the industry’s most closely watched regulatory battles.
Jo Cox’s sister explains why she wants to talk about killer being right-wing fascist neo-Nazi for first time
Centene to offer buyouts to some employees
Strategy Buys 1,587 Bitcoin for $100M Below Its Blended Cost Basis, Lifting Stack to 846,842 BTC
-
Business1 day agoNo Jackpot Winner as $257 Million Prize Rolls Over to $269 Million Monday Draw
-
Crypto World4 days agoOppenheimer backs SpaceX as $70 billion retail frenzy builds
-
Crypto World4 days agoMarkets Rally as SpaceX IPO Looms Amid Iran Tensions and Inflation Surge
-
Fashion3 days agoWeekend Open Thread: Tuckernuck – Corporette.com
-
Crypto World21 hours ago
Zimbabwe Requires Crypto Businesses to Register Annually Under New FIU Regulations
-
Entertainment6 days agoThe Ryan Gosling True Crime Thriller On Netflix That Gets Even Stranger, Stream It Now
-
Sports6 days agoBangladesh beat Australia after 20 years in ODIs, register only their second win over six-time world champions | Cricket News
-
Tech3 days agoNanoClaw integrates JFrog registries to secure AI agent downloads
-
Tech3 days agoThis Week In Security: Microsoft On Microsoft, Register Your Domains, Linux On ARM, And FreeBSD Joins The File Cache Club
-
Crypto World3 days agoBitget enters Argentina’s regulated crypto market through PSAV registration
-
Tech4 days agoDutton Ranch star claims they ‘didn’t see any disruption’ on set following Chad Feehan’s exit from Yellowstone spinoff fueled by Taylor Sheridan clash rumors
-
Politics4 days agoPolitics Home | Healey Resignation Is “Colossal Failure Of Government”, Says Former Labour Defence Secretary
-
NewsBeat4 days agoEl Nino has formed in the Pacific and could set records, forecasters say
-
Tech5 days ago‘This is Seattle’s position on AI’: City Council votes unanimously to pause big new data centers
-
Entertainment4 days agoDonnie Wahlberg & More Heat Up Las Vegas at Circa’s Barry’s Downtown Prime
-
Sports4 days agoFirst Time Since 1971: Australia Register Historic Low In ODI Cricket
-
Tech4 days agoOpendoor Ends India Operations, Fueling a Bigger Conversation About AI and Outsourcing
-
Politics4 days agoBelfast burns, while Met chief points finger at Iran and Russia
-
Business6 days agoThailand Ranks Second Worldwide for AI Adoption Growth, Microsoft Reports
-
NewsBeat3 days agoFBI searches office of Ohio voter registration group
You must be logged in to post a comment Login