XRP Ledger Rebrands and Gains a $3.2 Billion African Partner, Yet the Token Lingers Near $1.20

Ripple partners with Flutterwave for 34 African markets, XRPL gets major upgrade (xrpld, 30-40% storage cut), yet XRP token languishes near $1.20, down 36% YTD.

The XRP ecosystem is undergoing a quiet transformation on two fronts. The underlying blockchain has just received its most significant infrastructure upgrade in years, and Ripple has secured a partnership that opens doors across 34 African markets. Yet the token itself remains anchored near $1.20, almost two-thirds below its 52-week peak.

Ripple’s strategic investment in Flutterwave, the African payments infrastructure company valued at roughly $3.2 billion, goes far deeper than a capital injection. Flutterwave will integrate Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD, the Ripple Payments network, and the XRP Ledger into its platform across 34 African markets. The aim is to slash settlement times and foreign-exchange margins on cross-border payments — a market where multi-day delays remain the norm in many parts of the continent. This partnership could eventually drive meaningful transaction volumes onto the XRPL, but for now, it has not stirred the token’s price.

On the technical side, the XRP Ledger’s core software was upgraded to version 3.2.0 on June 15. The most visible change is the rebranding from rippled to xrpld. Beyond the cosmetic renaming, the update brings the fixCleanup3_2_0 amendment, which bundles fixes for single asset vaults, the lending protocol, tokenized assets, and permissioned markets — all areas critical for institutional use cases. New invariance checks ensure that deleted accounts do not leave artifacts on the ledger. Node operators must reconfigure their scripts and monitoring systems, as configuration paths, database directories, server metadata, and version names have all changed.

The upgrade also delivers a measurable efficiency gain: storage requirements for network nodes drop by 30% to 40%, making node operation cheaper and more stable. And for developers, applications can now query XRP Ledger protocol information without running a live server — a feature that simplifies wallet integrations, blockchain explorers, and automated tools.

David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO emeritus, migrated his own hub server to the new version on June 16. For ordinary XRP holders, nothing changes — wallets and balances remain untouched.

The network itself is under real pressure. On June 15, the XRP Ledger processed nearly 900,000 transactions. The following day saw roughly 770,000, with a peak throughput of 23.49 transactions per second. Payments alone exceeded 400,000 on each of those two days. The upgrade is rolling out under live load, not in a test environment.

Despite all this activity, XRP’s market performance remains dour. The token trades around $1.19 to $1.21, down about 2% on the day and roughly 36% year-to-date. It sits 67% below its 52-week high of $3.65. The 200-day moving average at $1.56 is well above the current price, and the 50-day average at roughly $1.27 is about 8% higher. The relative strength index is neutral at 48, offering no clear directional signal.

There are flickers of institutional interest. XRP-based exchange-traded products have recorded inflows for two consecutive weeks, most recently $10.7 million. Seven spot XRP ETFs are live in the US, collectively holding around $1 billion in assets under management. However, price erosion has trimmed that figure from $1.11 billion to $1.06 billion, as new inflows are partially offset by valuation losses.

Whether the combination of a network overhaul and an African expansion corridor can break the token out of its rut depends on how quickly the Flutterwave integration translates into real transaction volumes on the XRPL — and whether the infrastructure improvements attract enough institutional users to shift the supply-demand balance. The coming months will reveal if the user activity of recent days is a temporary spike or the beginning of a sustained trend.