Priced at $1.37 right now, XRP (XRP 0.83%) has lost about 62% of its value since peaking near $3.65 in July 2025. At a market cap of around $84 billion, it’s not an absurd valuation for a cryptocurrency with real institutional relationships and a functioning payments network. The price shouldn’t be considered a serious impediment for anyone considering buying the coin today.
The problem is what you’re actually buying. Ripple, the company that issues XRP and builds the infrastructure around it, has assembled a cohort of over 300 financial institutions to do business on its RippleNet and, by extension, the XRP Ledger (XRPL). But the link between that network’s growth and the coin delivering returns to its holders is much weaker than it appears. Let’s look at why.
Image source: Getty Images.
There’s a big gap between the success of the network and the coin’s returns
Having hundreds of banks active on RippleNet sounds like a slam dunk for XRP to gain in value over time as financial institutions use it to interact with Ripple’s set of financial services. But as of late 2025, only about 40% of those institutions actually use XRP for settlement through Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service, which uses XRP as a bridge currency.
Even within its liquidity service, XRP is held for just a handful of seconds per transaction before being converted into the destination currency, which means it creates efficiency for the institutions using it but doesn’t really lead to any sustained buying pressure, nor is it likely to.
Today’s Change
(-0.83%) $-0.01
Current Price
$1.35
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$83B
Day’s Range
$1.33 – $1.36
52wk Range
$1.14 – $3.65
Volume
1.2B
Then there’s the issue of RLUSD (RLUSD 0.01%), Ripple’s stablecoin, which now functions alongside XRP in Ripple Payments. Stablecoin settlements might end up being most settlements in the long run, as stablecoin prices don’t bounce around during transfers like XRP’s does. Banks that prefer stablecoins can use RLUSD instead, meaning RippleNet and its self-branded stablecoin can thrive without boosting XRP’s price.
In other words, RLUSD is, much like RippleNet, another context in which Ripple, the company, can succeed in its goals without bringing XRP holders along for the ride.
The coin might climb anyway
Despite issues with a few of its fundamentals, XRP’s price will probably rise over time.
Spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding the coin have attracted roughly $1.4 billion since launching in November 2025. Furthermore, Ripple holds around 40 billion XRP in escrow and operational wallets, giving it an enormous financial incentive to support the coin’s price through the levers it controls, such as institutional partnership announcements, tech upgrades, lobbying, and supply management. And the coin’s holder community is among the largest, most patient, and most consistently enthusiastic in the entire crypto sector, which counts in the long run.
So, XRP at $1.37 is not overpriced, and if you hold XRP, there’s no urgent reason to sell. Deploying fresh capital, though, means betting on Ripple deciding to alter the protocol to make the coin more appealing to hold, and presently, there is no evidence that this will happen.
