XRP is trading just above $1, leaving the token at its weakest price level of the year, but onchain data paints a different picture. 

The exchange-held XRP supply continues to fall, Binance withdrawals have exceeded deposits for seven straight days, whale flows are holding positive and spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have attracted $243 million in inflows since April.

The improving onchain data points to healthy network positioning, even as XRP continues to search for a price bottom.  

XRP supply on exchanges continues to shrink

Crypto analyst Amr Taha noted that Binance’s XRP reserve has fallen to its lowest level since March after roughly 100 million XRP left the exchange over the past month. Binance’s balance stood at about 2.68 billion XRP on June 25, down from 2.78 billion XRP on May 12, accounting for the largest outflow among major trading platforms.

XRP multi-exchange daily reserve. Source: CryptoQuant

Other exchanges also posted smaller declines. Upbit’s reserve fell to 2.48 billion XRP on June 25 from 2.51 billion XRP on May 31, while Bybit’s holdings declined to 82 million XRP from 92 million XRP on June 2. Binance led in absolute outflows, while Bybit recorded the steepest percentage decline.

Taha also highlighted a significant shift in Binance transaction activity. XRP withdrawal transactions have exceeded deposits for seven consecutive days since June 17. The seven-day withdrawal share climbed to 53.8% on June 23, its highest reading since June 2024, while deposits fell to 46.1%, the weakest level since 2024.

XRP daily deposit/withdrawal transactions (%) on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant

The metric tracks transaction count rather than XRP volume. This indicates users are moving coins off Binance more frequently than sending them to the exchange, marking the longest withdrawal-led stretch in roughly a year.

Large XRP holders supported the trend. XRP whale flow on the 90-day moving average has stayed positive throughout the quarter at 5.143 million XRP per day, showing consistent net accumulation by large wallets instead of distribution. 

XRP whale flows. Source: CryptoQuant

Institutional demand has also added support. Spot XRP ETFs recorded $2 million in net inflows on June 24, lifting June’s total netflows to $31 million. Since April, the total cumulative inflows have reached $243 million.

Related: SBI to acquire Bitbank in $289M deal creating Japan’s biggest crypto exchange

XRP price approaches a major demand zone

From a technical standpoint, the higher-time-frame market structure remains bearish for the altcoin. XRP touched $1.01 on Thursday, its lowest price of 2026, leaving the token close to its first move below $1 since November 2024. The decline has pushed XRP down 43% year-to-date.

XRP/USDT, one-week chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The next key area for XRP sits within the fair value gap between $1 and $0.63, an unfilled price gap created during the sharp rally in late 2024 that could attract buying interest if the decline extends in the coming weeks. 

Black Swan Capitalist founder Versan Aljarrah continues to focus on the longer-term chart. The analyst said XRP has spent years building a large accumulation range with higher lows on both weekly and monthly timeframes.

XRP/USD, one-month chart analysis by Versan Aljarrah. Source: X

Aljarrah argued that extended consolidations often produce stronger breakout moves once the price eventually breaks out of the range, with the analyst targeting $10, i.e., a 900% increase from the current price. 

Related: HYPE down 22% from record highs: Will spot demand revive the uptrend?

Story Protocol has rebranded as the DATA Foundation after replacing its original intellectual property licensing strategy with a new focus on AI training data infrastructure.

According to the company’s Thursday announcement, the layer-1 blockchain project will now build systems for sourcing, verifying, licensing, and paying contributors for data used to train artificial intelligence models.

Today, Story becomes The DATA Foundation.$IP is now $DATA. The Story Network is now DATA Network, tracking 1B+ data records with a singular mission: to become the trust layer for all AI training data.

Welcome to The DATA Foundation. pic.twitter.com/u54K9kD1n5

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— The DATA Foundation (@datafdn) June 25, 2026

The company described AI training data as “the most valuable and least solved category of IP,” arguing that major AI labs are facing a costly supply problem as easily scraped internet data becomes less useful.

The market reaction was positive despite pressure across crypto. Shortly after the rebrand, Story Protocol’s renamed DATA token rose 16.7% to $0.35, outperforming a crypto market hit by nearly $1.5 billion in liquidations after U.S. PCE data showed annual inflation accelerated to 4.1% in May.

Story is moving from open IP licensing to verified AI data

Story said its original plan was to create an IP layer for the internet, but president and product chief Andrea Muttoni said the project ran into a problem with large rights holders. According to Muttoni, companies behind valuable music, games, and brands were reluctant to expose key intellectual property to permissionless licensing because they wanted to keep tight control over their assets.

The company said the new DATA Foundation will focus on data that AI labs cannot easily scrape from the open internet. In its announcement, Story argued that frontier AI companies now need data that is legal, high-quality, and traceable, rather than more undocumented material collected from public web pages.

As part of the rebrand, Story is launching Trace, an on-chain registry designed to track provenance and licensing for AI training data. The company said Trace will let AI firms verify data sets while allowing contributors to set and enforce licensing terms.

Muttoni will become CEO of the DATA Foundation, while Kled founder Avi Patel will join as chief data officer and adviser. Story founder Seung-yoon Lee will also remain involved as an adviser.

DATA token rises as crypto projects chase AI demand

Story’s move also brings Kled into the new structure as the flagship app on DATA. According to the company, Kled pays people for real-world data tasks such as recording videos of their surroundings or capturing ambient audio, creating licensed data sets that can be used for AI training.

Muttoni said Story’s incubated AI data-processing project, Poseidon, had already shown “immediate traction” with major AI firms and raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025. Under the new setup, Poseidon will serve as the processing layer of the protocol, while Trace will provide verification and licensing records on-chain.

Lee framed the new strategy around data that cannot be copied from websites, including physical movement, speech, driving behavior, and workplace activity.

“The most important IP of this era is the data you can’t scrape: how a surgeon’s hands move, how a robot grips, how people speak, drive, and work in the real world.”

He added that DATA is intended to prove the origin of real-world data, license it, and pay the people who created it.

The pivot places Story alongside other crypto firms turning toward AI as investor interest in the sector grows. Forbes reported Monday that Web3 gaming company Immutable is moving from gaming toward an AI marketing platform for game publishers. Coinbase also announced earlier this month that it is developing a tool that would let consumer AI models connect to a user’s exchange account and execute trades or strategies.

Kraken has expanded its institutional lending business through a new Maple-backed financing facility built around a bankruptcy-remote SPV.

According to a joint June 24 announcement, crypto exchange Kraken and on-chain asset manager Maple have launched an institutional warehouse financing facility for crypto-backed loans, bringing a lending structure commonly used in traditional credit markets into digital asset finance.

The companies said the facility will support Kraken’s over-the-counter lending business through a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle (SPV) funded with USDC.

Unlike standard bilateral crypto loans, the transaction is arranged through the SPV, with Maple supplying senior financing while Kraken retains an economic interest in the facility. According to the companies, this setup allows Kraken to increase lending capacity without committing additional balance-sheet capital.

Institutional lending is moving toward structured credit

Under the announced structure, Kraken affiliates will originate, sell and service the loans while maintaining a position in each transaction. The underlying Bitcoin and Ether collateral will be held by Kraken Financial, the Wyoming-chartered Special Purpose Depository Institution, and independent SPV administrator Zaria will oversee administration of the facility.

Neither Kraken nor Maple disclosed the size of the financing arrangement or its commercial terms.

Maple said the structure gives institutional lenders senior, overcollateralized exposure backed by Bitcoin and Ether while allowing collateral and loan performance to be monitored on-chain. According to the company, using a bankruptcy-remote SPV separates the financing vehicle from the borrower’s balance sheet, a framework commonly used in commercial mortgage-backed securities and other structured credit transactions.

RWA.xyz data shows tokenized credit has increased to more than $6.2 billion in distributed value from roughly $1.87 billion a year earlier. The same dataset identifies Maple as the largest platform in the segment, managing approximately $1.4 billion in tokenized credit assets.

The latest launch arrives as institutional crypto lending continues to recover from the market disruptions of 2022. Following the failures of lenders, including Celsius and BlockFi, companies have increasingly focused on collateral management, bankruptcy protections, and tokenized credit infrastructure designed for institutional borrowers.

Tokenized credit products continue to multiply

The Kraken-Maple facility arrives as more firms expand blockchain-based credit products. Earlier this year, Ripple secured a $200 million credit facility from investment manager Neuberger Berman to support its institutional prime brokerage lending business.

Recent weeks have brought several new blockchain-based credit initiatives. As reported by crypto.news, Stablecore launched an early-access stablecoin and digital asset program for U.S. credit unions.

At the same time, Capital B unveiled plans for a Bitcoin-backed credit product for European investors. Morpho also released its Midnight white paper for a fixed-rate, fixed-term on-chain lending protocol.

However, not every project has succeeded. Earlier this month, Radiant Capital said it would wind down after failing to recover from a $50 million exploit in 2024.

Even so, analysts at Bernstein said in May that tokenized credit could represent a $4 trillion addressable market as blockchain-based lending expands into markets such as mortgages, auto loans, and small-business financing.

A survey arranged by digital asset services provider CoinShares found that more than half of UK-based financial advisers reported the bulk of their clients’ crypto holdings were outside their oversight.

According to the results of a CoinShares survey released on Thursday, 52% of UK advisers in a group of 261 European wealth management professionals said that the majority of their clients’ digital assets exposure was essentially “invisible” to them. Among all the EU countries surveyed, including France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, the number was 25%, with 61% of advisers saying that they worked in companies that explicitly restricted digital assets or provided no clear internal guidance.

“The capital has already been allocated,” said CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti. “The people entrusted with managing it simply cannot see it, and in most cases not because clients are unwilling to engage, but because firm policy prevents them from doing so. This is not a knowledge problem. It is not a demand problem. It is a firm-policy problem becoming a wrong-way risk.”

He added:

“[…] Visibility comes before advice. You cannot allocate, manage risk or earn trust over assets you cannot see.”

Source: CoinShares

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the watchdog overseeing digital asset regulation, reported in December that about 8% of the country’s adults were invested in crypto. The group recently proposed allowing authorized investment funds to hold up to a 10% allocation of cryptocurrency exchange-traded notes.

Related: Bank of England eases stablecoin rules, introduces 40B pound issuance cap

Potential new leadership to shake up UK crypto policy?

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned as Labour leader on Monday amid pressure from many in his own party, opening the door to a recently elected member of parliament to take the reins.

In a recent by-election, former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham won a seat as a member of parliament representing Makerfield, positioning him to be heavily favored by many in Labour to replace Starmer. While it’s unclear how Burnham may handle crypto policy on a national stage, as mayor, he supported the blockchain industry as a driver for economic development.

Magazine: AI is banking the unbanked in Africa… faster than crypto

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Aave is the largest decentralized lending protocol, allowing users to lend and borrow crypto assets without intermediaries. Depositors earn yield by supplying tokens to liquidity pools, while borrowers post crypto collateral to take out loans, with smart contracts automatically managing the process.

The protocol was thrust into the center of one of DeFi’s biggest crises in April after attackers tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group exploited KelpDAO’s cross-chain bridge to mint roughly $292 million of unbacked rsETH.

The hackers deposited the tokens as collateral on Aave and borrowed real assets against them, leaving the protocol with an estimated $190 million to $230 million in bad debt when the collateral became worthless.

Although Aave’s own smart contracts were never compromised, the exploit triggered more than $8 billion in withdrawals as users rushed to reduce their exposure, highlighting the contagion risks of DeFi’s interconnected ecosystem.

Kraken has stepped up acquisitions as parent company Payward prepares for a potential public listing, targeting businesses that expand its regulated trading infrastructure.

In April, Payward agreed to acquire crypto derivatives exchange Bitnomial for up to $550 million, adding a full suite of U.S. CFTC licenses covering brokerage, clearing and exchange operations. The deal follows Kraken’s broader push beyond spot crypto trading as it builds a multi-asset platform ahead of a widely anticipated IPO.

Coinbase-backed Ethereum layer-2 network Base resumed block production Thursday after a disruption of roughly two hours that halted the blockchain.

In an update, the Base team said the chain has resumed working and internal nodes were syncing correctly, though it continues to investigate the root cause of the incident. The team also advised ecosystem node operators to restart their Base nodes to restore synchronization.

The first public indication of problems came at 16:03 UTC, when Base reported that mainnet block production was “unhealthy.” By 16:52 UTC, the team said it had identified a problem and was pursuing multiple remediation efforts.

The incident temporarily halted transaction processing on one of Ethereum’s largest layer-2 networks. Base has not yet disclosed what caused the invalid block or whether the issue stemmed from a software bug or another consensus-related fault.

The network also previously suffered an outage in August 2025.

The team said it will continue to monitor network stability and provide further updates as its investigation continues.

Read more: Base Network Suffers 1st Downtime Since 2023, Halts Operations for 29 Minutes