XRP's Busy Ledger: More Wallets, More Active Accounts, and a Patch That Won't Move the Price

XRP traded 2.5% higher today without a single confirmed catalyst behind the move. Two sets of on-chain data and a scheduled network fix offer plausible talking points, but none of them has been shown to explain the advance. For holders, the takeaway is a clean separation: what the XRP Ledger is doing and what the token is doing are two different stories.

A patch, not a panic

The most concrete date on the calendar is a code change called fixCleanup3_4_0, which could activate tomorrow around 14:46 UTC provided validator support holds. The amendment closes a permissions bug: accounts authorized to burn issued tokens could, under certain conditions, also mint them. XRP's own circulating supply is untouched by the fix, and no public exploitation of the flaw has been reported. This is scheduled maintenance, not a confirmed attack on the network.

Support stood at 33 of 35 tracked validators in the most recent count, though activation remains conditional on that backing persisting. Separate proposals concerning token authorization are still under review and do not count as active network rules — so the pending fix should not be read as a blanket implementation of everything under discussion.

Wallets versus buyers

Santiment recorded 7,934 new wallets on the XRP Ledger on Sunday, the sixth-highest daily figure of 2026. Media coverage linked the number to today's price gain, but no causal connection between the two has been established. A newly created wallet proves only that an address exists — not that anyone will use it, and certainly not that XRP is being bought. The same analyst house floated a possible tie to the Binance hack and a shift toward self-custody, while cautioning that no direct link is proven. One actor can also control many addresses, so account growth is not user growth.

Santiment attaches a more constructive read to two conditions: sustained creation of more than 4,000 new wallets per day, and a reclaim of $1.30. On the weaker side, it sketches a scenario of a price below $1.20 paired with fewer than 3,000 new wallets daily. Both are conditional assessments, not price targets.

Activity doubled while the price slipped

CryptoQuant's numbers tell a similar story from a different angle. Daily active accounts climbed roughly 132% in the month to date, from 15,678 on October 3 to 36,342 — more than double — even as XRP's price weakened over the same stretch. That divergence is the point: network activity and token price measure different things, and an active account says nothing about whether a new investor stands behind it or existing holdings are simply rotating between addresses.

Transfers point the same way. Receiving addresses rose 44% over the period, sending addresses 41.7%. Growth is therefore not confined to freshly minted accounts — established addresses are participating more heavily too. None of this proves capital inflows, since transfers can occur without a single additional XRP being purchased.

Custody news predates the rally

On the institutional side, Ripple and BNY announced an expanded collaboration on October 27. According to the companies, BNY's custody platform supports both XRP and RLUSD, and the partners intend to explore institutional applications including tokenized trade finance. The news bears directly on XRP but broke well before today's move, so it cannot be the trigger either.

What the combined data set actually supports is narrower than the headlines suggest: the ledger is being used more intensively, and infrastructure and custody arrangements are advancing on their own timeline. A demand-driven recovery remains unproven. The signal to watch is whether activity persists and is simultaneously confirmed by the market — only that combination would amount to more than a rising count of addresses.