Ripple's Lending Push Meets a Chilly Macro Tape as XRP ETFs Pause

Ripple bets institutional collateral will drive XRP Ledger adoption, but XLS-65 and XLS-66 validator support lags the 80% activation threshold.

Ripple is betting that on-chain credit, not payments, will be the feature that finally pulls institutional balance sheets onto the XRP Ledger. The company's product lead, Jazzi Cooper, has called institutional collateral the network's true "killer use case," and the roadmap is being built to match that claim.

Two technical standards underpin the effort: XLS-65 for single-asset vaults and XLS-66 for a lending protocol designed to enable uncollateralized on-chain loans drawn from pooled capital. Neither is live on mainnet yet. Validator support sits at 25.71% for XLS-65 and 22.86% for XLS-66, well short of the 80% threshold that must hold for two consecutive weeks before activation. A separate upgrade, XRPL Lending Protocol v1.1, is slated to ship alongside the XRPL 3.4.0 release in the week beginning September 19, adding features such as MemoData for vault transactions.

The infrastructure push extends beyond Ripple's own codebase. Clearpool is migrating its CPOOL token to a new CLEAR token on a 1:1 basis while widening its footprint onto the XRP Ledger. Total issuance will rise from one billion to 1.125 billion units, with 70% allocated to existing holders. Half of protocol fees will fund a buyback-and-burn mechanism backing the new token. Clearpool says it has intermediated more than $965 million in institutional credit since 2021, and future loans will be denominated in Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin.

Stablecoin Supply Swells as Treasury Tooling Expands

RLUSD itself is scaling quickly. Ripple minted an additional 10 million tokens on the XRP Ledger on Friday, bringing circulating supply on that network to roughly $1.053 billion. Total issuance has climbed more than 50% in a month to about $2.4 billion. Management is leaning on the roughly 1,200 treasurers and finance chiefs acquired through the GTreasury deal — a cohort that processes around $13 trillion in annual transaction volume — as a distribution channel. Ripple has also added AI agents called GSmart to its treasury platform, which the company says automate cash-flow forecasting, liquidity management and risk reporting, always subject to human sign-off.

Institutions are meanwhile scrutinizing the stablecoin for payments and treasury work, and Ripple has laid out the regulatory structure behind it.

A Short Fund Waits, a Long Fund Doubles

On the ETF side, the picture is lopsided. A Friday filing from Listed Funds Trust set an effectiveness date of October 11 for the Teucrium 2x Short Daily XRP ETF — a routine Rule 485(b) extension rather than a regulatory rejection, and no guarantee that trading will begin. One source puts the count of such deferrals since April 2025 at 19, a figure that has not been independently confirmed.

The long side tells a different story. XXRP, an already-trading fund that delivers twice the daily performance of XRP, has nearly doubled assets under management since mid-August, rising from about $78 million to roughly $151.5 million. US spot XRP ETFs have pulled in a cumulative $1.68 billion in net inflows, and Goldman Sachs holds an XRP ETF exposure of about $87.4 million, according to the data.

Flows cooled sharply as the week wore on, though. After $12.29 million entered XRP funds on Tuesday and $5.14 million on Wednesday, Friday brought a complete standstill. US spot Bitcoin ETFs, for their part, logged four straight days of outflows. For the week through September 7, US spot XRP ETFs had still gathered $110.49 million, lifting cumulative inflows to around $1.79 billion.

Macro Headwinds and a Fading Bill

Broader conditions are doing the asset no favors. XRP's funding rate dropped to minus 0.0094% on Friday, the most negative reading since June 28, after core inflation printed at 0.3% month-on-month against expectations of 0.2%. Prediction markets responded by pricing an 83% chance of a Fed rate hike in September.

Sentiment has also been dented by the Senate's vote on the CLARITY Act last Wednesday. The odds of the bill passing by year-end have slid to 18–22%, down from 82% at the start of the year.

Not every regulatory signal points the same way. Nasdaq Texas listed XRP in September alongside Bitcoin, Ether and Solana as a digital asset meeting the standards for commodity-based trusts, which may hold at least 85% in such qualifying assets.

Ledger Housekeeping and a Tight Trading Range

The XRPL community has cleared another update: the fixCleanup3_3_0 amendment drew 82.86% validator support and is inside its two-week activation window, with activation possible as early as September 11.

Price action reflects the mixed backdrop. XRP changed hands at $1.34 on Sunday, down 1.2% on the day and 5.1% over the week, with selling pressure intensifying since the Senate vote. The 30-day picture remains firmly positive at plus 33%. A separate reading put the token at $1.36, near its 50-day average of $1.22 — a 12% gap — with a 30-day gain of 35% but a year-to-date decline of 26%. The 52-week high of $3.18, set on September 14, 2025, still sits 57% above the current quote.

For investors, the setup splits in two: the speculative short bet remains stalled in regulatory limbo, while the tangible build-out — lending rails, vault standards and stablecoin volume — keeps adding substance underneath.