The past year should have been XRP’s (CRYPTO:XRP) big one. Ripple settled the five-year SEC lawsuit that had hung over the token since 2020, won conditional approval for a national trust bank charter, and grew its RLUSD stablecoin past $1.6 billion.
Every box XRP holders waited years for has now been ticked. Yet XRP trades at $1.09 today, almost exactly a year after it peaked at $3.65, a fall of about 70%. Ripple’s wins kept coming and the XRP price kept sliding. So why is XRP not going up, even as the network racks up win after win?
How XRP Fell 70% While Ripple Kept Winning
XRP hit $3.65 in July 2025, which is its highest price in seven years. A crypto bull market and growing confidence that Ripple was winning its years-long fight with the SEC propelled the price just short of its $3.84 all-time high. Then it started sliding, and a year later it still hasn’t stopped.
In August, the moment XRP holders waited years for finally arrived, with Ripple settling the SEC case for good. But the XRP price barely moved, because the July rally had already priced the win in.
Then spot XRP ETFs launched in November, Ripple won conditional approval for a national trust bank charter in December, its RLUSD stablecoin pushed past $1.6 billion, and in March 2026, the SEC and CFTC classified XRP as a commodity, finally ending the legal uncertainty that had clouded XRP for years. Each of those wins should have sent the XRP price higher, yet the coin kept dropping through all of it, and now trades near $1.09.
One of the primary reasons for XRP’s poor performance over the past year is bearish market sentiment. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB, and almost every major crypto have dropped in value all year, and XRP is no exception. But most of the pressure came from outside crypto.
The tensions between the U.S. and Iran, which began in late February, keep pushing oil prices higher, with government bond yields at their highest in months. When safe government bonds pay that well, investors move money out of risky investments like crypto to collect the guaranteed return. Inflation has stayed high and the Fed isn’t cutting rates, so the pressure on the crypto market keeps building, and coin prices keep falling.
XRP has been falling steeper than most altcoins, because it is a higher-beta asset. That means it swings further than Bitcoin on the way up or down, rising more when the market climbs and falling more when it drops. That’s what has made XRP lose about 70% of its value in just over a year.
Why Weak Demand Is Keeping the XRP Price Down
For most of the last five years, one thing drove XRP: the lawsuit. People bought the token as a bet that Ripple would beat the SEC, and every twist in the case moved the price. It was the whole reason to own XRP.
Then Ripple won, and the bet was over. There was nothing left to wait for, so the traders who had piled in for the verdict took their profit and moved on. That is why the actual settlement last August barely moved the XRP price. The people who would have bought the news had already bought it years earlier, and they sold after XRP rallied to $3.65.
Ripple always knew retail traders would fade, and the plan was for institutions to replace them. Banks and funds move far more money than retail ever could, and they were expected to pour in once XRP was a safe, regulated asset. That is the demand XRP is now waiting on, and most of it hasn’t arrived.
The reason is that big institutions still won’t touch XRP without permanent legal clarity. A court ruling and an agency label help, but both can be challenged or reversed, and no fund manager wants to build a large position on a status that could change. They are waiting for the CLARITY Act—the bill that would write XRP’s legal standing into law for good—and until it passes, most of that money stays on the sidelines.
The one group of institutional buyers already active is the spot XRP ETFs. Because these funds hold actual XRP, every dollar that goes in has to buy the token on the open market, which is real, direct demand. That demand was strong when the ETFs launched, but it has since dried up, with total inflows stuck near $1.49 billion for weeks. And the clarity the crypt bill would bring is what would bring in massive ETF inflows once again. Even Standard Chartered, one of the most bullish voices on XRP, cut its year-end price target from $8.00 to $2.80 back in February due to XRP’s poor performance.
How XRP’s Growing Supply Caps the Price
There is a second reason the XRP price stays down. More XRP enters the market every month, and almost none of it ever leaves. Every month, Ripple unlocks 1 billion XRP from escrow.
Ripple relocks 60% to 80% of that billion a few days after, and the portion it keeps goes to things like funding partnerships and liquidity deals, not onto exchanges to be sold. Only about 200 to 400 million actually reaches the market, which is a small amount next to XRP’s daily trading, and the schedule is set to last for nine more years, so buyers already expect it.
The bigger issue is the total supply, as XRP is pre-mined, so all 100 billion tokens were created at the start instead of being mined over time, and about 62 billion are in circulation today. The rest are released on that fixed schedule over the coming years, so the number of XRP on the market keeps rising.
Nothing pulls those tokens back out, because XRP barely burns.. A tiny fee is destroyed on every transaction, but that comes to only about 14 million tokens in more than a decade, next to nothing against 100 billion. So the amount of XRP people can buy and sell keeps growing.
In a market with strong demand, that steady increase would be easy to absorb, but XRP doesn’t have strong demand. The one buyer group large enough to take in the new supply, XRP ETF buyers, has nearly stopped, so each month more XRP reaches the market than there is money to buy it. When supply grows faster than demand, the price can’t rise much.
Looking at Bitcoin for example, there will only ever be 21 million coins, and new supply keeps shrinking, so as more people want it, they compete for a fixed and shrinking number of coins, and the price rises. XRP is the opposite as its supply keeps growing and nothing burns off to balance it, so it has no built-in scarcity to push the price up. In a market already short of buyers, that constant new supply holds XRP down.
What Could Push the XRP Price Higher Again?
Nothing is pushing XRP higher at the moment. Demand is weak, new supply keeps arriving, and the Ripple wins won’t lift the price until they bring in buyers. The thing that could change that is the CLARITY Act.
The bill would write XRP’s status as a commodity into federal law—the permanent, unchallengeable clarity that big institutions have been waiting for. If it passes, the funds that have stayed on the sidelines would finally have a reason to buy, and that buying is what the XRP price has been missing.
Until then, XRP’s price performance would remain the same. Ripple keeps winning, while XRP keeps drifting.
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