XRP’s Institutional Momentum Accelerates: ETF Inflows Hit Yearly High as Senate CLARITY Act Advances – Token Up Only 7% Weekly

XRP rises to $1.48, buoyed by record ETF inflows of $84M in May and Senate committee approval of a bill classifying it as a digital commodity.

The infrastructure around XRP is thickening at a pace unseen in months. Institutional money is flowing into spot exchange-traded funds at a record clip for 2026, a key US Senate committee has just sent a market-structure bill to the full chamber, and the XRP Ledger’s tokenised-asset market has blown past $3 billion. Yet the token itself is only beginning to shake off a prolonged slump.

XRP traded at $1.48 late last week, up roughly 7% over seven days and finally above its 50-day moving average of $1.39. That marks a recovery from the mid-May doldrums, when the coin was stuck at $1.39, nursing a 5.65% weekly loss and a year-to-date decline of nearly 26%. The 200-day moving average, a key long-term trend indicator, still sits at $1.72 – a 19% gap that underscores the distance the token must cover before bulls can declare a trend reversal.

The near-term improvement owes much to a surge in ETF demand. Spot XRP products hauled in $18.4 million on 15 May alone, pushing cumulative inflows for the month to more than $84 million, the strongest monthly total so far this year. By the end of the period, weekly inflows had reached roughly $60 million, the best week since late 2025, and the monthly tally approached $95 million. Seven spot ETFs now hold a combined 881.5 million XRP tokens, representing over $1.37 billion of accumulated assets under management.

That asset base has pushed XRP ahead of Solana in the ETF pecking order. XRP-linked funds manage $1.25 billion, versus $1.05 billion for Solana products, cementing the token’s position as the third-largest digital-asset ETF category behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Canary XRP ETF alone holds positions worth more than $300 million.

The institutional build-out extends beyond fund flows. Ripple recently closed a $200 million credit facility for its prime brokerage arm, Ripple Prime, and executed a tokenised US Treasury redemption in under five seconds alongside JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo Finance. Tokenised real-world assets on the XRP Ledger have climbed past $3 billion, with the value distributed across the network rising 7.7% over 30 days to $368 million. Meanwhile, the number of wallets holding at least 10,000 XRP hit an all-time high of 332,230, extending a consistent growth trend that began in June 2024. Active addresses also jumped to a two-month high of more than 48,000, signalling rising day-to-day usage.

The most consequential catalyst, however, is regulatory. The Senate Banking Committee approved the Digital CLARITY Act on 14 May with a 15-to-9 vote on an amendment, sending the bill to the full Senate, where it needs 60 votes to advance. The legislation would legally classify XRP as a digital commodity and split oversight between the SEC and the CFTC – precisely the legal scaffolding institutional investors have demanded since the SEC’s 2020 lawsuit against Ripple. An earlier joint SEC-CFTC determination in March 2026 already labelled XRP a commodity, but a federal statute would offer far stronger protections against future interpretive battles.

The bill’s path is not entirely clear. An ethics clause remains a sticking point; Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber has suggested that a deal on that provision will probably be necessary before a floor vote. The White House has pencilled in 4 July 2026 – the 250th anniversary of US independence – as a target date for signing the bill into law.

Standard Chartered sees enormous ETF potential if the legal framework solidifies, projecting inflows of between $4 billion and $8 billion by year-end. That kind of capital would dwarf the current month’s figures and potentially break the technical resistance that has kept XRP pinned below its 200-day average.

For now, the market is pricing in the good news only partially. The recent weekly gain has improved sentiment, but the token’s year-to-date loss remains at roughly 21%, and its 12-month slide stands at nearly 41%. Even as institutional doors swing open, the long shadow of the Ripple lawsuit and the cautious stance of many bank partners – who often use stablecoins for settlement while merely paying XRP network fees – mean the direct price impact of these developments has so far been muted. The CLARITY Act, if it clears Congress, may be the key that finally lets the infrastructure story translate into a sustained rally.