XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) climbed as high as $3.65 during its 2025 run. Today it trades near $1.08, down about half on the year, in one of its roughest stretches yet. Something stranger is now happening underneath the price.
The amount of XRP held on exchanges—the coins actually available to buy and sell—has been cut in half in just nine months, down to a seven-year low. When the supply for sale dries up like that, the price is supposed to climb, because there’s less to go around. Instead of moving higher, the XRP price has been steadily declining. So if the sellable supply is disappearing, why is the price still stuck?
Half of XRP’s Exchange Supply Has Vanished
Back in October 2025, exchanges held about 3.76 billion XRP ready to trade. Today that number is closer to 1.6 billion, which is the lowest it has been in seven years. In nine months, half the XRP that people could easily sell has left the exchanges. On Binance alone, reserves have dropped about 20% since late 2024, pushing the exchange’s scarcity gauge to its highest level in two years.
So where did all those coins go? Two places, mostly. The spot XRP ETFs pulled in roughly 970 million XRP and locked it away in custody for their investors, where it won’t be traded day to day. At the same time, long-term holders moved large amounts off exchanges and into private wallets.
Either way, coins are leaving the one place they can be sold quickly and moving somewhere they tend to stay untouched for a long time. On paper, that’s exactly the setup that sends a price higher, since fewer coins for sale usually means buyers have to pay up.
Why a Shrinking Supply Hasn’t Moved the Price
A shrinking supply can’t do the one thing that lifts a price, which is make people buy. Price is a tug-of-war between buyers and sellers. Taking coins off the market thins out the sellers’ side, but the price only jumps if buyers show up to fight over what’s left. Through most of 2026, they didn’t.
The reason buyers stayed away has almost nothing to do with XRP itself. The war between the U.S. and Iran pushed oil prices higher, which pushed inflation back up to around 4%. With inflation climbing, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates high, and high rates make safe bets like government bonds more appealing than risky ones like crypto. So money flowed out of assets like XRP and Bitcoin.
Bitcoin took the same hit, sliding from the $70,000s toward $58,000 and dragging the whole market down with it, XRP included. On top of that, everyday buyers and short-term traders mostly stayed away all year. With that much pressure pushing down, a shrinking supply never stood a chance of lifting the price.
The squeeze may also be less tight than that number suggests. The seven-year-low figure only tracks coins held on about ten major exchanges. And analysts estimate somewhere between 14 and 16 billion XRP is still within reach of the market through other venues. The supply on exchanges has genuinely shrunk, but XRP is not about to run out of coins to sell—it’s tighter than usual, but not empty.
XRP Whales Are Sending Mixed Signals
If you want a clue about what comes next, the big holders are usually a good place to look. The problem right now is that they aren’t pointing in one clear direction.
Some of them have clearly been buying. Wallets holding at least a million XRP have added a net 42 new addresses since the start of the year, the first increase in that group since September. Together, those large holders have piled on about 1.53 billion XRP over the past six months, and they now control roughly 74% of the entire supply. A lot of those coins have moved straight into cold storage, which is what people do when they plan to hold for a while.
Others have been doing the exact opposite. Even as some whales bought, others were selling, offloading more than 30 million XRP in a matter of days and taking profit into every small bounce rather than holding through it.
Above all of that, Ripple’s escrow still holds around 36 billion XRP and releases a net 200 to 300 million into circulation every month, a steady trickle of fresh supply that never stops. Put it together, and the whales roughly cancel each other out, because this kind of data tells you who is holding, not what they plan to do next.
What XRP’s Supply Squeeze Is Waiting For
A tight supply doesn’t trigger a rally on its own. What it does is make a rally bigger once the buying finally shows up. And XRP’s current setup is loaded, but just waiting for something to ignite a rally.
The primary catalyst remains the Digital Asset CLARITY Act. The bill that would settle XRP’s legal status in the U.S. for good, is back in front of the Senate when it returns on July 13, with about three weeks to act before its summer break. Right now XRP counts as a commodity only through a regulator’s ruling that a future administration could reverse, and that uncertainty is enough to keep the big players away.
The CLARITY Act would turn that ruling into settled law. Standard Chartered estimates up to $8 billion could flow into XRP ETFs if it passes. That much money hitting today’s thin supply is exactly how a squeeze turns into a sharp move higher.
The catch is that passage is far from certain. The bill is still about seven votes short in the Senate. If it stalls and Bitcoin stays heavy, all that vanished supply just keeps doing nothing for the XRP price. That is where XRP actually stands. It’s coiled tighter than the price suggests, but waiting on a vote it doesn’t control.
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