XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) just had one of its quietest days on-chain all year. Barely 25,000 wallets did anything on the network, and new sign-ups fell to their lowest level since late 2024. At the same time, the price slipped about 3% over the week to $1.11.
Normally, an empty network and a falling price feed each other, since fewer users means less demand, and less demand means a lower price. But XRP is still holding above $1, and its ETFs have gone almost silent this month too. So the bigger puzzle isn’t why activity dried up, but what it means when the users, the institutions, and the price all go quiet at the same time.
XRP Ledger Activity Just Hit a Rare Low
The XRP Ledger has gone quiet, recording just 25,350 active addresses—its second-lowest day of 2026—and it has since drifted even lower to around 22,888. Active addresses are simply the unique wallets doing something on the network on a given day, so this is a direct measure of how many people are actually using XRP. Right now, not many are.
However, the more telling number is new wallet creation, which fell to 2,130—the lowest since November 2024. This is the vital one, because a network can coast for a while on the users it already has, but it only grows when new people show up. And right now, new people have stopped showing up.
Back in late June, new wallets briefly spiked to nearly 5,000 in a day, which looked like fresh interest coming back, but it wasn’t. That bump came from existing holders buying the dip, not newcomers joining, and once the dip-buying faded, the network went quiet again.
XRP ETFs Have Gone Quiet
For most of this year, XRP ETFs were the one thing bulls could always point to. Even while the XRP price sagged through the first and second quarter of the year, money kept flowing into these funds week after week, which meant big institutions were still buying when almost no one else was. That steady bid was the floor under the price, but tmonth, even that went quiet.
On July 10, the ETFs pulled in just $107,000, a rounding error for a product that was taking in millions a month earlier. Several other days this month recorded flat zeros, and there were $7.29 million in outflows on July 8. Total assets across the funds slipped below $1 billion, down to around $996 million. Back in May, these same funds took in well over $100 million for the whole month.
It isn’t just everyday users who have gone quiet. The big institutional money that carried XRP through the first half of the year has pulled back too. So when both everyday users and big buyers step back at the same time, you’d normally expect the XRP price to drop sharply, but it hasn’t.
Why Is the XRP Price Still Holding?
With the network this quiet and the ETFs flat, you’d expect XRP to be falling much steeper than it currently is. The reason it isn’t comes down to the people still holding, and what they’re doing with their coins.
A huge share of XRP, roughly 68% of the circulating supply, is held by large holders who are not selling. Instead, they keep pulling their coins off exchanges and into private storage. That’s the move people make when they plan to hold for the long haul, not sell. In fact, more than 90% of the XRP that recently left exchanges came from these big wallets going into cold storage.
So the floor under $1 isn’t being built by fresh buyers or new demand. It’s being held up by the long-term holders who refuse to sell while everyone else drifts away. The network went quiet and the institutions went quiet, but the long-term holders didn’t—and that’s the whole reason a near-empty network hasn’t dragged the price down with it.
What Would Pull Users Back to XRP?
A quiet spell isn’t a crisis for XRP. The network has always worked this way, with tiny fees and a price driven more by news and speculation than by everyday use. A slow stretch is normal while it waits for a catalyst.
The catalyst will be genuine usage, people and businesses putting the ledger to work. Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin is already settling around $2.5 billion in volume on the XRP Ledger, and roughly $4 billion in tokenized real-world assets now live on the network. Native lending is coming in the ledger’s next major upgrade, and an Ethereum-compatible sidechain is already live.
If any of these catch on and pull activity back on-chain, the network recovers and the quiet ends. If none do, XRP keeps drifting sideways, held up by its large holders, until something changes.
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