JPMorgan Predicted Up to $8 Billion of Year-One XRP ETF Inflows. Here’s Why Inflows Are Stuck at $1.5 Billion

JPMorgan told investors in January 2025 that spot XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) ETFs could pull in as much as $8 billion in their first year of trading. Then, in April 2025, Standard Chartered predicted the same $8 billion of first-year inflows for XRP funds.

These forecasts were made way before the first XRP ETF even existed. The funds have now been trading for more than eight months since launching in mid-November, attracting about $1.5 billion in cumulative flows. Why have ETF inflows fallen short of what the biggest Wall Street institutions anticipated?

What JPMorgan and Standard Chartered Predicted for XRP ETF Inflows

In January 2025, JPMorgan analysts published a research note estimating that spot XRP ETFs could gather between $4 billion and $8 billion within six to twelve months of launching. The bank got those numbers from the two crypto ETFs that already existed. 

Bitcoin’s funds had absorbed about 6% of Bitcoin’s market cap in their first year, roughly $108 billion, and Ethereum’s about 3%, so applying the same take-up rates to XRP’s smaller market cap produced the $4 billion to $8 billion range.

A month later, the bank refined the band to $4.3 billion to $8.4 billion while warning that altcoins still lacked regulatory clarity at the SEC and CFTC. The forecast leaned on XRP’s legal status getting resolved, which at the time looked close, with a new administration and a new SEC chairman expected to be friendlier to crypto.

In April 2025, Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, initiated coverage on XRP with a report projecting the same $4 billion to $8 billion of ETF inflows in the first twelve months. He built his entire price roadmap on top of those inflows, proposing XRP would reach $5.50 by the end of 2025, $8 in 2026, and $12.50 by 2028, overtaking Ethereum’s market cap along the way.

However, both banks assumed the buyers who filled Bitcoin’s funds would also buy XRP’s. Bitcoin’s ETFs were filled by wealth managers and institutions buying the one crypto their compliance departments already understood, and no research existed showing those buyers wanted a second, smaller, legally unsettled coin. That untested assumption is where the forecasts would come apart.

XRP ETF Inflows Have Stalled at $1.5 Billion

XRP ETFs pulled in $666.61 million in their first month and another $499.91 million in December, per SoSoValue data. At that pace, the funds would have gathered roughly $7 billion in a year, which was near the top of what the banks predicted.

However, the funds collected just $15.59 million in January and $58.09 million in February. In March, investors pulled out a net $31.16 million, and that remains the only month in the funds’ history that ended in the red. Then investors put back $81.59 million in April.

The buying picked up again in May, when the CLARITY Act, the bill that would permanently classify XRP as a commodity under federal law, looked closest to passing. The funds took in $131.94 million that month, marking the best flow month of the year, and CoinShares tied the buying directly to the bill’s progress. But the bill stalled, and the inflows slowed with it, dropping to $59.46 million in June and $27.29 million in July. And the funds recorded zero flows on 11 of July’s 22 trading days.

Meanwhile, the XRP price trades at roughly half what it did when the funds launched, so the coins the funds bought are now worth far less than what investors paid for them. Investors have put in $1.51 billion since November 2025, but the funds now hold just $988.78 million. About a third of everything invested is gone on paper, and a loss like that makes the funds a hard sell to new money.

Why the Institutional Buyers Never Came for XRP

The easy answer is the bear market, and it deserves half the blame. The funds launched five weeks after Bitcoin’s cycle peak, straight into the first post-halving year Bitcoin has ever finished in the red, and the damage hit every altcoin fund. Solana’s ETFs have gathered about $1.15 billion against the $3 billion to $6 billion JPMorgan gave them in the same January note, which is almost exactly the same fraction of the forecast that XRP managed.

The other half is the legal clarity both banks assumed XRP would have by now. Bloomberg Intelligence found that only 16% of XRP ETF assets were tied to institutional filers at the end of last year, with retail investors holding the rest, and Goldman Sachs, the largest disclosed institutional holder with a $154 million position, sold out of it completely in the first quarter. 

The institutions that stayed away came back for exactly one month, in May, when the CLARITY Act looked closest to passing, and they slowed down again when the Senate set the bill aside.

Moreover, the institutions that did buy an altcoin fund this year got paid to choose Solana over XRP. Most of Solana’s ETF money went into one product, Bitwise’s staking fund, which holds roughly $760 million, stakes all of its Solana, and targets rewards above 7% a year just for holding it. The XRP Ledger has no staking, so no XRP fund can pay a yield at all, while institutions held roughly half of Solana’s fund assets against XRP’s 16%.

Will the $8 Billion Ever Arrive for XRP ETFs?

To reach even the $4 billion inflows, XRP ETFs would need every remaining month to beat November’s figure, which remains the biggest month ever. Standard Chartered has already cut its 2026 XRP price forecast from $8 to $2.80 as the inflows dried up, and JPMorgan has not published a revision of its estimates.

But Ripple argued on its blog in April that the $8 billion forecast has not been tested by a full bull cycle, and that allocations made in a down market scale up when conditions improve. That much holds up, because a rising XRP price would erase the paper losses these funds are carrying and give retail investors a reason to buy again.

However, the bigger money still waits on the CLARITY Act. The bill would give XRP the legal classification that pension funds, insurers and bank asset managers need before they can hold it, and those institutions are the ones who took Bitcoin’s ETFs to $108 billion. 

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