Ripple Forges Powerful Stablecoin Alliance, but XRP Token Remains Trapped at $1.09 as Goldman Sachs Exits

XRP dips 42% YTD despite Ripple's Open USD Consortium membership, $1.47B ETF inflows, and surging on-chain activity, while Goldman Sachs exits $154M position.

Ripple’s corporate machine is humming. The payments firm joined the Open USD Consortium — a coalition backed by Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock — which plans to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin on Solana and Polygon later this year. The XRP Ledger itself is conspicuously absent from that list, underscoring a persistent disconnect between Ripple’s operational wins and the performance of its native token.

XRP sits at $1.09, up 3.25% on the day but still nursing a year-to-date loss of 42.11% and a 12-month slide of 51.38%. The distance from its 52-week high of $3.65, set in July 2025, exceeds 70%. Even a modest daily bounce does little to disguise the broader grind lower.

Goldman Sachs Dumps Its $154 Million Stake

Compounding the token’s woes, Goldman Sachs quietly liquidated a massive XRP ETF position in the first quarter of 2026. The bank had held roughly $154 million in XRP-linked exchange-traded products at the end of 2025, but regulatory filings reveal it exited completely. Analysts characterize the move less as a bearish vote on the asset and more as a tactical shift: Goldman used the ETFs to service client orders rather than as a proprietary bet, and has since rotated into crypto equities such as Coinbase and Galaxy Digital.

The selloff stands in sharp contrast to the broader ETF landscape. Spot XRP ETFs have drawn cumulative net inflows of about $1.47 billion since their launch in November 2025, with eight consecutive weeks of positive flows. Recent weekly additions had hovered around $60 million, though the final week of June brought a more modest $23 million as price weakness tempered enthusiasm.

On-Chain Activity Tells a Different Story

Beneath the surface, network metrics are flashing signals that contradict the price chart. The number of active XRP addresses surged 72% in just two weeks, climbing from roughly 23,000 to nearly 39,500. Meanwhile, the stablecoin RLUSD — Ripple’s own dollar token — has accumulated a circulating supply of approximately $1.61 billion, aided by its availability in Japan through the SBI Holdings partnership. A separate research report estimated RLUSD had already processed over $2.5 billion in settlement volume, with almost $900 million of that coming from direct trading pairs against XRP itself.

That level of on-chain activity would typically support a higher valuation, but the mechanism has yet to translate into sustained buying pressure for the token.

Institutional Money, Token Stagnation

The divergence between capital flows and price is now the sector’s most intriguing puzzle. While Bitcoin ETFs bled a record $4.5 billion in June and most altcoin funds suffered redemptions, XRP has remained a persistent outlier with steady institutional demand. Yet the price barely reacted. Analysts view the $300 million monthly inflow mark as a potential tipping point that could finally break the stalemate; current monthly pace is well below that threshold.

Ripple president Monica Long highlighted the firm’s embrace of cross-network payments, and the Open USD Consortium membership underscores how seriously traditional finance takes Ripple’s infrastructure. But that interest has so far stopped short of boosting XRP’s spot price. As one market observer noted, institutions seem willing to pay for the railway but not the ticket.

What Lies Ahead

The token’s immediate fate likely hinges on whether the steady ETF inflows can regain momentum and whether any material new use case emerges for XRP on its own ledger. The RLUSD ecosystem is growing, but the stablecoin itself is designed to settle across multiple blockchains — not to lock value exclusively into XRP.

For now, XRP remains a study in contrasts: a network with rising active addresses, a swelling stablecoin economy, and a token that cannot escape the gravitational pull of $1.09. Until the gap between corporate Ripple and the XRP token begins to close, the market may be stuck watching a promising story with a disappointing price tag.