XRP Ledger’s Central Bank Milestone Contrasts With Token’s Dwindling Whale Activity and Price Slide

Whale transactions drop 57% as RBA successfully tokenizes bonds on XRP Ledger, yet XRP price remains subdued at $1.37, down 27% YTD.

The XRP ecosystem is sending investors two sharply conflicting signals. On one hand, the Reserve Bank of Australia has successfully tokenised government bonds on the XRP Ledger through Project Acacia, using Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin for settlement. On the other, on-chain metrics show large traders pulling back sharply: transactions exceeding $1 million dropped from 157 to 67 in just nine days, a plunge of 57.3%, according to analyst Ali Martinez.

Meanwhile, exchange reserves of XRP have also been contracting. CryptoQuant data shows the amount of tokens held on trading platforms fell from roughly 2.745 billion to 2.709 billion over a 24-hour period – a reduction of more than 35 million XRP, or 1.29%. While declining exchange balances can suggest accumulation, they can also simply reflect movements into cold storage. When combined with the retreat in whale activity, the picture becomes more ambiguous: fewer tokens available for immediate sale, but also less participation from the biggest addresses.

Institutional inflows and retail wallet creation tell a slightly different story. CoinDesk reported net inflows of around $42 million into XRP?linked investment products in the prior week, including $8.88 million on the final trading day. Santiment data also shows roughly 4,300 new XRP wallets were created in a single day. Yet the price remains subdued at $1.37, barely above its 50?day moving average of $1.40 and 19% below the 200?day line. The relative strength index stands at 59, a neutral reading that offers little directional clarity. CoinGecko ranks XRP as the fifth?largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of about $84 billion and daily trading volume of roughly $1.61 billion.

Project Acacia, conducted between August 2025 and February 2026, saw banks, fintechs, custodians and exchanges test the full lifecycle of an Australian government bond as a digital twin on a public?permissioned version of the XRP Ledger. Settlement was executed in RLUSD, and the technology stack included Ripple, Chainlink, Fireblocks and JPMorgan. The pilot covered 20 use cases and 12 real?money programmes, encompassing not just sovereign bonds but also corporate debt, private loans, securitised receivables, repos, carbon credits and mining licences. Ripple’s stablecoin handled the settlements – yet the XRP token itself played no essential role in any of these transactions.

That disconnect is now reflected in the token’s market performance. XRP is down roughly 27% since the start of the year and has lost more than 42% over the past twelve months. The Reserve Bank and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre plan to push ahead with a regulatory sandbox for tokenised market infrastructure, tokenised government bonds and interoperable deposit tokens. On the regulatory front, the Clarity Act for crypto assets has cleared a Senate committee, with a full floor vote expected in June. XRP exchange?traded funds already manage around $1.3 billion, and JPMorgan has forecast inflows of $4?8 billion in their first year. In Japan, 44 million Rakuten users gained the ability to handle XRP through a payments app in April, while a banking integration covering 17 million customers is slated for the third quarter.

All of these developments reinforce the XRP Ledger’s utility as infrastructure. But as Project Acacia demonstrates, that utility does not automatically translate into demand for the XRP token. With whale activity fading and price action stalled near key moving averages, the market is left weighing institutional build?out against an asset that is increasingly being built around – not with.