XRP's Infrastructure Boom and RLUSD Record Fail to Lift Price as Institutional Lines Shift

XRP slides to $1.36 as RLUSD stablecoin hits $1.7B market cap, but Goldman Sachs exits ETFs while UBS and Bank of America enter with small stakes.

Despite a stream of bullish infrastructure developments and a doubling of its dollar-pegged stablecoin, XRP's price continues to drift lower. The token traded at $1.36 on Friday, down roughly 27% since the start of the year and more than 60% below its 2026 high. Yet beneath the surface, a quiet institutional rebalancing is taking shape — one that has seen new names enter the XRP ETF arena even as old ones bow out.

The most eye-catching metric belongs to Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin. Market capitalisation hit an all-time high of $1.7 billion on 22 May, nearly doubling within a single quarter. Around 80-82% of the circulating supply sits on Ethereum, with the remainder on the XRP Ledger. Daily trading volume recently exceeded $213 million across more than 8,700 active wallets. To reduce concentration risk, Ripple plans to expand RLUSD to Layer-2 networks Base, Optimism and Unichain via Wormhole bridging technology.

Parallel to that, British crypto custodian Copper has integrated RLUSD into its settlement and treasury workflows, allowing institutional clients to hold and use the stablecoin natively on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. And on 20 May, Ripple Prime completed its integration with EDX Markets, giving its prime brokerage clients direct access to spot and perpetual-futures liquidity. Michael Higgins, Ripple Prime's International CEO, said the aim is to create a secure bridge between traditional and digital markets, with RLUSD eventually serving as the primary collateral for derivatives trades on the platform.

The institutional endorsement doesn't stop there. US spot XRP ETFs recorded a twelfth consecutive day of positive inflows on Thursday, adding $8.8 million and bringing May's total to roughly $107 million. Total assets under management across all XRP-based funds have crossed $1.15 billion, with cumulative inflows approaching $1.4 billion. That places XRP ETFs third behind bitcoin and ethereum — though the gap remains enormous. BTC products command over $59 billion, ETH products about $13 billion. XRP funds do, however, comfortably outrank Solana equivalents, which sit at around $1.05 billion.

But the flow of money into ETFs masks a more nuanced institutional picture. Goldman Sachs fully liquidated its XRP-related ETF holdings in the first quarter of 2026, positions that had totalled roughly $154 million across products from Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale and 21Shares at the end of 2025. Bloomberg analysts had previously characterised Goldman's accumulation as market-making activity rather than directional conviction, so the exit came as little surprise.

Meanwhile, UBS, Bank of America and RBC disclosed small initial XRP ETF stakes in their Q1 filings. UBS, the world's largest asset manager, accumulated about 200,000 shares in the Volatility Shares XRP ETF — a volume too small to move markets, but a signal nonetheless that new institutional names are dipping a toe in the water.

On-chain data adds a further wrinkle. The number of new XRP wallets created on 20 May jumped from roughly 2,500 to 4,300 within 24 hours, the fourth-strongest wallet spike of the year, according to Santiment. Daily active addresses also climbed from 32,000 to nearly 43,500. While Santiment considers network growth one of the most reliable early signals for trend reversals, it notes that growth has been generally declining since late 2025, making the recent spike look more like a one-day outlier than sustainable adoption.

The token's price action remains trapped. At $1.36, XRP sits just below its 50-day moving average of $1.40 and far from the 200-day line at $1.70. Cost-basis distribution data shows roughly 3.75 billion XRP purchased between $1.37 and $1.45, creating a dense supply zone that could trigger break-even selling. A secondary congestion zone lies between $1.68 and $1.70. Analyst Crypto Michael sees that range as the upper boundary of a falling wedge; a weekly close above it could open a technical target of $3.52.

Two fundamental catalysts hover in the background. Rakuten Wallet has integrated XRP into its payment app, giving 44 million Japanese users the ability to pay at over five million merchants. The more significant factor is the CLARITY Act, passed by the US Senate Banking Committee on 14 May. The bill would formally classify XRP as a digital commodity under CFTC oversight, removing the regulatory uncertainty that has kept many institutional players on the sidelines. A full Senate vote is expected in June.

The XRP Ledger itself is due for a technical upgrade. The amendment "fixCleanup3_1_3" is scheduled for activation on 27 May, addressing fixes for NFTs, permissioned domains and the ledger's lending protocol. Only about 40% of validators have updated their nodes so far. Ripple CTO David Schwartz has urged the rest to upgrade promptly to avoid what is known as "amendment blocking." The update is considered a technical prerequisite for scaling the real-world asset projects that have already reached $3 billion in tokenised value on the ledger.

For now, the price remains disconnected from the infrastructure build-out. Whether that changes in the coming weeks will depend on a smooth protocol upgrade, continued RLUSD expansion, and — most of all — the outcome of the Senate vote on the CLARITY Act.