XRP Draws Record Retail ETF Flows Despite Goldman's $154M Exit and $1.44 Resistance Wall

A massive sell order between $1.44-$1.45 stalls XRP recovery despite record $95M May ETF inflows from retail; Goldman exits, but CLARITY Act passage may unlock institutional demand.

A billion-coin sell order parked between $1.44 and $1.45 is all that stands between XRP and a meaningful price recovery, even as retail investors pour record sums into spot exchange-traded funds. The token may be down roughly 26% year-to-date, but the capital flowing into regulated products tells a different story — one of widening access rather than outright abandonment.

May is shaping up to be the best month yet for XRP ETF inflows. After hauling in 67 million dollars during the week to mid-May alone, cumulative monthly intake has reached nearly 95 million. That figure brings total net inflows since the products debuted in November to 1.39 billion. Yet the composition of that capital is heavily skewed: Bloomberg Intelligence analysts estimate that 84% of the assets under management in XRP spot ETFs now comes from retail investors, compared with just 15.9% from institutional 13F filers. By way of contrast, Solana ETFs boast an institutional share of almost 49%.

The retail tilt makes the recent moves on Wall Street all the more striking. Goldman Sachs liquidated its entire XRP ETF holdings in the first quarter, a position worth 154 million dollars spread across issuers such as Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton and 21Shares. The bank did not exit crypto altogether — it maintained roughly 700 million dollars in Bitcoin exposure and trimmed its Ethereum ETF stake by 70% to 114 million — but the selective pullback from altcoin products is hard to ignore. The freed capital appears to have been redirected into infrastructure names like Circle, Coinbase and Galaxy Digital.

At the same time, a handful of other institutions crept into the space with tiny but symbolically important positions. UBS disclosed roughly 197,369 units of the Volatility Shares XRP ETF, valued at about 1.49 million dollars. Bank of America registered a smaller stake in the same fund worth around 224,000 dollars. The Royal Bank of Canada, one of the country’s largest lenders, reported just 2,000 units of the Bitwise XRP ETF — a sum of roughly 30,000 dollars that is negligible against RBC’s balance sheet but notable as a first formal entry into a US-listed XRP product. Millennium Management also revealed some XRP-linked exposure, though its core crypto holdings remain overwhelmingly concentrated in Bitcoin ETFs.

The regulatory calendar offers the most plausible catalyst for a shift in institutional appetite. The CLARITY Act, which would formally classify XRP as a commodity under federal law, cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May by a 15–9 vote. A final floor vote is expected in June or July. Standard Chartered has projected that passage could unlock billions of dollars in additional institutional inflows. Market participants see the bill as the foundation for a potential re-rating of the asset.

On the ground, network activity is picking up. The number of active XRP addresses hit its highest level since late March in the middle of May. South Korea remains a particular stronghold: on exchanges Upbit and Bithumb, XRP’s trading volume recently surpassed that of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The price, however, has failed to reflect that momentum. XRP is currently changing hands around 1.38 dollars, a whisker above its 50-day moving average of 1.39 dollars but well below the 200-day average of 1.71 dollars. That gap underscores the distance to a sustainable trend reversal.

For now, the most immediate barrier is a massive sell wall. More than one billion XRP tokens are queued for sale between $1.44 and $1.45 — a zone many traders view as a critical break-even threshold. Until that block is absorbed, even robust retail demand will struggle to push the token higher. The next round of 13F filings, due in August, will provide a clearer picture of whether Goldman’s exit was an isolated shift or the start of a broader institutional recalibration.