Ripple Backs SEC Crypto Rule With Caveats as XRP Fund Flows Turn Uneven

Ripple has thrown its weight behind the SEC's proposed "Regulation Crypto Assets," but the company used its Wednesday comment letter to press for changes on three fronts: investment contracts, the underlying tokens themselves, and secondary-market transactions. The endorsement carries no legal weight for XRP's status — the proposal remains under review, and Ripple's filing does not alter how the token is classified.

The regulatory push comes as a pair of on-chain developments illustrate a gap between network activity and token demand.

ETF inflows: a positive total, a patchy picture

US spot XRP ETFs have attracted net capital overall, though the flow was not uninterrupted. From October 19 through Thursday, the funds pulled in a combined $4.3 million, according to media reports. Friday brought no fresh inflows — not an outflow, but a pause in what had been a constructive run.

The headline number masks sharp divergence between products. Franklin Templeton's XRPZ recorded $2.25 million in purchases on Wednesday, while Bitwise's fund shed $1.55 million. Across all tracked funds, Wednesday's net gain came to $708,510. For investors, the aggregate balance is the more meaningful gauge; opposing moves at individual issuers limit what any single large purchase figure can tell you.

Tokenized fund issuance is not a token purchase

Franklin Templeton this week issued roughly $150 million in additional tokenized money-market fund shares on the XRP Ledger, executed through two subscriptions of $75 million each, CoinDesk reported. The sgBENJI tokens represent units in the Singapore-domiciled Franklin OnChain U.S. Dollar Short-Term Money Market Fund.

The mechanics explain why swelling ledger usage has not translated into token demand. The shares trade directly against RLUSD, with XRP needed only to cover minimal network fees. Holding sgBENJI means owning a tokenized fund unit, not the cryptocurrency — a distinction that the shared ledger does not erase. A larger fund footprint on the network does not imply an equivalent economic boost for XRP.

The new units went to a wallet sharing the same eight signature addresses as the issuance account, with two signatures sufficient to authorize transactions, according to CoinDesk. Whether that wallet belongs to a single investor or serves as custody for multiple clients is unclear, so the concentration proves neither a lone whale nor broad institutional appetite — only that the holdings are technically bundled. Franklin Templeton also retains the ability to approve, freeze, or claw back the positions on the ledger, meaning tokenization does not strip the issuer of control over the fund product.

XRP changed hands at $1.27 on Friday, down 1.8%. The fresh issuance has yet to provide any visible counterweight to that price pressure, though the parallel timing alone does not establish a cause for the decline.

Payment liquidity built on RLUSD

Elsewhere on the ledger, Ripple and Arf announced a Friday partnership to supply licensed firms with short-term settlement liquidity for cross-border payments, funded in RLUSD. Arf says the initial financing is typically repaid within one to five days. The arrangement is a liquidity facility, not an obligation to buy XRP — another case where activity on the XRP Ledger should not be read as an automatic bid for the token.

Validator support pushes a ledger fix to November

A planned amendment to the XRP Ledger has slipped. Activation of fixCleanup3_4_0 is now expected on November 4 at 14:46 UTC, per media reports, after validator backing fell below the required threshold and restarted the two-week approval window. The date holds only if support persists.

Taken together, the recent ETF inflows sit alongside a set of developments whose impact on XRP remains tied to specific conditions — a validator vote, a regulatory review, and the question of whether new applications on the ledger eventually generate demand for the token itself rather than for the assets moving across it.