XRP's $1.5 Billion ETF Vote of Confidence Meets a Stubborn Bear Market

XRP trades near 19-month low, 70% below 2025 peak, even as US spot ETFs see eight consecutive weeks of net inflows totaling $1.5 billion. Price action diverges from institutional accumulation.

Three years after a landmark court ruling ripped XRP from regulatory limbo, the token finds itself in a strange place. The legal cloud has lifted, a crop of US ETFs has drawn $1.5 billion in cumulative inflows, and Ripple’s institutional pipeline keeps widening. Yet XRP trades near $1.11 — a whisker above its 19-month trough and 70% below the July 2025 peak of $3.65. The contradiction is hard to ignore.

The price chart tells a grim story. Year-to-date, XRP is down 40.85%; over the past twelve months the loss stands at 62.43%. At $1.11, with a 4.23% gain on the day, the token sits 23% below its 200-day moving average of $1.44 and 3.37% beneath the 50-day line. The relative strength index hovers around 48–49, neither oversold nor overbought — just stuck. That is the kind of drift that makes traders check for a pulse.

But underneath the surface, something curious is happening. US spot XRP ETFs have recorded net inflows for eight consecutive weeks, even as the underlying asset slid to multi-month lows. Since the products launched in November, cumulative net inflows have reached roughly $1.5 billion. The actual dollar value of assets held, however, has shrunk to about $930 million. The arithmetic is blunt: new money keeps arriving, but the price has fallen faster than capital can keep up. Investors are accumulating more tokens while watching their total wallet value shrink.

That steady buying was briefly interrupted in the week of July 6–10, when the XRP ETF sector posted net outflows of $7.18 million — the first weekly outflow in two months. The entire sum came from a single fund: $7.29 million left the Bitwise XRP ETF, most of it on July 8. The other issuers — Canary Capital, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale — saw zero net flows. A blip, not a rout. Total net assets across all seven approved US XRP funds stand at $996.65 million, just a shade below the psychologically important $1 billion mark.

One high-profile institutional move did make headlines. Goldman Sachs built a $154 million disclosed position in XRP ETFs during the fourth quarter of 2025, then unwound the entire stake by the end of the first quarter of 2026. A 13F filing in mid-May confirmed the exit. Bloomberg analysts had classified the earlier buildup as trading-desk activity rather than a directional bet, and the quick reversal backs that reading. Notably, the same week the Goldman exit became public, XRP ETFs collectively attracted $60.5 million in fresh inflows — proof that one whale's departure didn't spook the broader institutional herd.

The legal foundation that made these products possible traces back to July 13, 2023, when Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sold on public exchanges is not a security, while institutional sales by Ripple violated securities law. The ruling triggered a 70% single-day price surge and sent exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini scrambling to relist the token. In August 2024, the court imposed a $125 million civil penalty on Ripple and barred future unregistered institutional sales. Both sides appealed, then dropped their appeals in August 2025, cementing XRP's status as a non-security under current law.

Since legal closure, Ripple has been busy behind the scenes. It forged a strategic partnership with South Korean custodian BDACS, teamed up with tokenization platform Ctrl Alt to support a Dubai Land Department real-estate project, and brought BNY Mellon on as primary custodian for RLUSD reserves. The acquisition of Standard Custody & Trust Company closed in June 2024. Forbes, in its July 2026 ranking of the top ten cryptocurrencies, placed XRP fourth by market cap at $69.21 billion — behind only Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB, and ahead of every other digital asset.

Seasonality offers a faint glimmer of hope: July has historically been XRP's strongest month, with an average return of nearly 10% and a median around 11%. But the macro backdrop is working against the calendar. Bitcoin's dominance sits at 55.4%, a risk-off level that keeps altcoins under persistent pressure. For XRP to break its slide, Bitcoin would need to halt its own downtrend first.

The narrative around XRP has shifted profoundly in three years. What began as the object of a bitter SEC lawsuit has become a regulated payment asset with a functioning ETF ecosystem, a growing roster of enterprise partnerships, and the kind of institutional distribution that would have been unthinkable in 2023. None of that is reflected in the price. Whether that gap eventually closes — and which side moves — is the open question.