XRP Slips 4.9% as Wall Street Builds Custody Rails and ETF Demand Catches Its Breath

BNY has widened its work with Ripple to cover custody of XRP and RLUSD for eligible institutional clients — a step that lands just as the token's spot exchange-traded funds take a breather and a broader flight from risk assets drags the price lower.

The custody expansion, announced on 27 October, also commits the two partners to explore institutional blockchain applications, tokenized trade finance among them. The XRP piece of that arrangement is explicit; the wider applications are still at the study stage, so the existing custody scope and the yet-to-be-examined use cases deserve to be weighed separately.

A Custody Win, With Stablecoin Tracks Running Alongside

The same day brought a separate tie-up between Ripple and Robinhood spanning stablecoins, crypto trading and financial management. Robinhood intends to use RLUSD for institutional settlement on the XRP Ledger, with broader availability inside its app pencilled in for later in 2026. A day after that, on 28 October, Coinbase listed RLUSD across its retail and institutional platforms, supporting transfers over multiple blockchains.

Those two moves put RLUSD at centre stage. Only the BNY agreement reaches XRP custody directly, a distinction that matters for anyone trying to map the recent flurry of partnerships onto the token itself.

Price Retreat Tied to the Wider Market

XRP traded down 4.9% on the day, caught in a market-wide sell-off rather than any fresh business disclosure from Ripple. Technology and semiconductor shares came under pressure, with Reuters reporting that worries over artificial intelligence spending and closer scrutiny of data-centre buildouts weighed on the sector. Coverage of the crypto market linked the losses in digital assets to that retreat from riskier holdings and to the liquidation of leveraged positions.

None of those drivers is specific to XRP, and no separate figure has been attached to the token's share of the liquidations. The security work on the XRP Ledger sits apart from the price action as well. The fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment went live a day earlier, closing a flaw in delegated permissions under which certain accounts authorised to burn issued tokens could, in particular conditions, also create them. XRP itself was never exposed, and no public exploitation has been reported.

Fund Flows: A Pause, Not a Reversal

On the fund side, US spot XRP ETFs recorded no net inflows on Tuesday, and preliminary figures pointed to a flat balance again on Wednesday — no net creations, no net redemptions. Monday had seen outflows of roughly $529,510.

The distinction is worth keeping straight: stalled inflows are not the same as sustained outflows, so the latest fund data signal pausing demand rather than capital leaving the products. October itself delivered $18.83 million in net inflows, the seventh positive month in a row, and cumulative net inflows reached $1.81 billion through 30 October.

Supply mechanics added their own wrinkle. On Sunday Ripple altered the distribution of its escrowed XRP, releasing one billion tokens and re-locking 700 million the same day, leaving 300 million outside the escrow lockup for the cycle.

Set side by side, the two threads tell a simple story: institutional plumbing is being laid at pace, while the funds that would channel fresh capital into XRP have yet to follow through. Whether wider access eventually shows up in stronger fund demand will be settled by future creations and redemptions.