XRP Ledger Volume Rose 79% in a Year With Traders Down 40%. Is XRP Being Used or Just Traded?
Trading on the XRP Ledger surged while the number of accounts doing that trading collapsed and the price fell by half. Whether that signals institutional takeover, wallet consolidation, or something else entirely changes everything about what the ledger's future looks…
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More XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) changed hands on the XRP Ledger, the blockchain XRP runs on, in the second quarter of 2026, and fewer accounts did the trading. Order-book trading on the ledger’s built-in exchange rose 79% from a year earlier, to 3.57 million XRP a day from 1.99 million, according to Evernorth’s Q2 2026 XRP Liquidity Report. The number of accounts placing those trades fell 40% over the same period, from 1,864 a day to 1,111.
Meanwhile, the XRP price trades at $1.41 as of September 6, 2026, down 50% over the past year even as trading on the ledger grew. So would fewer accounts trading bigger volumes mean XRP is being used more, or only traded more?
Each XRPL Account Traded Three Times as Much in Q2
Each account that stayed on XRP Ledger’s exchange traded three times as much. The average account moved 3,217 XRP a day in Q2 2026, up from 1,072 a year earlier, and order-book trades rose to 81% of everything traded on the exchange, from 54%.
Banks and trading firms could have moved in while smaller holders left. But an XRPL account is a wallet address, not a person, and one firm can run dozens of them, so Evernorth says the data does not prove institutional traders are replacing retail users. A firm that merged its trading from ten wallets into three would show up as fewer accounts and bigger trades with no new institution arriving.
New professional money could have arrived. Existing traders could have merged their wallets. Small holders could have gone quiet in a year when the XRP price fell 50%. In February 2026, XRPL switched on permissioned trading, a feature that lets an issuer restrict who can trade a token, and Evernorth suggests that drew institution-sized orders. The on-chain figures alone can’t tell those four apart.
Every Major Blockchain Lost Users in the First Half of 2026
Fewer wallets were active on the XRP Ledger on any given day.The number of addresses active in a day fell more than 23% over the first half of 2026, even as people opened about 490,000 new ones and the total rose from 7.91 million on January 1 to 8.40 million on June 30.
However, the same happened on every major blockchain. On-chain exchange volume across seven of the largest networks fell 46% from a year earlier and transaction fees fell 38%. Both figures suggest small holders pulled back from crypto in general, and XRP’s ledger was part of that pullback. In a year when the XRP price fell 50%, that’s the whole market losing users, not XRP alone.
Tokenized Assets on XRPL Grew 30 Times in a Year
Money arrived on the ledger while trading accounts fell. Tokenized assets, such as Treasury bills or fund shares issued as tokens so they can be held and moved on a blockchain, averaged $3.72 billion on XRPL in Q2 2026, more than double the first quarter and more than 30 times a year earlier.
RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin that’s built to trade at one dollar and backed by cash and Treasuries, added another $539 million in average balances, up 642% from a year earlier. Together that’s $4.26 billion held on the ledger, up from $99 million at the end of 2024.
Neither of those is a bet on the XRP price. A stablecoin balance is dollars waiting to be sent, and a tokenized Treasury is a bond held on XRPL. So a rising balance in either one shows the ledger being used to hold and move value, and a count of trading accounts can’t show that.
Which Side of the Ledger Does More for the XRP Price?
XRP is being both used and traded, on different parts of the same ledger. On XRPL’s exchange, fewer accounts traded more XRP in Q2 2026, and the data can’t say whether those accounts belong to new institutions or to the same traders with fewer wallets. Off the exchange, $4.26 billion of tokenized bonds and dollar-backed tokens are held on the ledger for use, not for a bet on the XRP price.
Tokenized assets could do more for XRP over time, because a Treasury bill or a stablecoin balance stays on the ledger through a bad year for the coin, and a trading account doesn’t. So if you hold XRP, the number of wallets active each day would tell you which of those is growing. If that number stops falling by the end of 2026, the users who left were probably leaving crypto as a whole, not just XRP.
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Sam Daodu is a crypto analyst who's spent nearly a decade making blockchain understandable—no easy task when most whitepapers read like fever dreams. He writes for 24/7 Wall St., covering Bitcoin, altcoins, and crypto market analysis for investors. Before crypto, he was a tech writer (back when explaining "the cloud" was peak innovation). Since 2018, he's written for CoinTelegraph, Yahoo Finance, The Block, Cryptonews, Zypto, Rain, and more—basically anywhere people want crypto news without the headache. Sam runs MacLabs Marketing, a content agency for crypto brands tired of sounding like AI wrote their website. He also publishes free crypto education on his site for Web3 enthusiasts who think "gas fees" is a typo. When he's not writing or staring at charts, Sam's either: - Watching anime (currently convinced One Piece has better tokenomics than most altcoins) - At the gym sculpting himself into a Greek god - Listening to the music your mum warned you only bad boys listen to Connect: LinkedIn | Email | MacLabs Marketing
