XRP Holds 15% Weekly Gain as Ripple Hardens Ledger Ahead of Batch Upgrade

XRP slips 5.2% to $1.49 but holds a 15% weekly gain as spot ETFs add $20M, RLUSD peaks at $2.44B, and the CLARITY Act fails a Senate vote.

Fresh capital keeps flowing into the XRP ecosystem even as the token cools off from its recent run. The spot ETFs tied to the asset, which only won regulatory clearance in March, pulled in another $20 million yesterday. XRP itself slipped 5.2% on the day to $1.49, yet the past week still shows a 15% advance — a gap that tells the story of a market weighing steady institutional inflows against unresolved political risk in Washington.

That tension has been the defining feature of the past two weeks. On September 15, the CLARITY Act — formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — failed to clear a procedural vote in the US Senate, with 49 senators in favor and 50 opposed. The tally fell well short of the 60 votes needed to open formal debate. According to Bloomberg and Reuters, the logjam triggered a broad wave of selling: more than $300 million in leveraged positions were liquidated, dragging XRP briefly toward $1.30.

Ripple responded to the setback by publishing a post titled "The Road to Clarity Ends (for now)." The bill had stalled over disputes about ethics rules governing crypto holdings held by public officials. For the moment, the missed legislative window has dampened hopes for swift regulatory certainty in the US — though it has not been enough to derail the recovery that followed.

RLUSD Sets the Pace With a $2.44 Billion Record

While the political track stalled, the economic layer around the network kept expanding. RLUSD, the stablecoin issued by Ripple, hit a peak circulating supply of $2.44 billion in September. More than $1 billion in market capitalization has been added during the current calendar year, making it one of the fastest-growing stablecoins of 2026.

A substantial share of that liquidity was minted on Ethereum, while the XRP Ledger accounts for $1.05 billion of the total. On September 10, a further 15 million RLUSD tokens were permanently destroyed by being sent to a null address.

Technical work has accompanied the volume growth. A maintenance amendment for the XRP Ledger went live on September 11, delivering fixes to automated market makers, credit functions, and trading structures.

AI Audits and a Stripe Hook for Agent Payments

Ripple switched on an AI-driven security review system yesterday, deploying automated fault detection to harden the network before additional features for institutional players are unlocked. The move lands squarely in a period of visible recovery — XRP changed hands at $1.50 today, up 1.4% on the session.

The hardening effort comes as the token's payment use cases widen. On September 17, Ripple connected XRP to Stripe's system for autonomous AI-agent payments, allowing the token to be used in environments where software programs — not human buyers — act as purchasers. The integration targets atomic settlement, in which a bundle of transactions either executes together or fails together.

Activation of that batch function is scheduled for September 29 at 14:06 UTC, provided the required quorum holds: 80% of validators over 14 consecutive days. Most recently, 30 of 35 validators signaled their support.

Meanwhile, US spot ETFs have resumed attracting fresh capital — a counterweight to the legislative blow-up in Washington that market participants continue to price against the ongoing institutional bid.