XRP's market cap fell 26% quarter-over-quarter to roughly $82 billion by the end of March 2026, while the token's price lost 27% to settle at $1.34. The downturn hit trading volumes hard too — average daily spot volume dropped 32% from the previous quarter, and perpetual futures volume slid 28.6%. But beneath the price slump, activity on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) tells a different story.
Price and Trading Volume Slide
The 27% price decline wiped out gains from late 2025, leaving XRP at $1.34 as Q1 closed. Market cap erosion to $82 billion reflected both the price drop and reduced investor appetite. Daily spot volume averaged $1.4 billion (using the 32% decline from an implied prior quarter figure), while perpetual futures saw a similar contraction. Exchange-traded funds holding XRP accumulated 775.4 million tokens by quarter's end, or about 1.26% of circulating supply — a sign institutional interest hasn't vanished entirely, but hasn't reversed the broader selloff.
On-Chain Activity and RLUSD Surge
Despite the price weakness, the network itself got busier. Average daily transactions on XRPL hit 2.48 million in Q1, up 35% from the previous quarter. Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin, built on XRPL, saw its market cap climb 45% to $340.3 million — the strongest quarterly growth since launch. The stablecoin's expansion suggests increasing demand for dollar-pegged assets on the ledger, even as XRP's speculative value slumped.
Real-World Assets and DeFi Infrastructure
The most dramatic growth came from real-world assets (RWAs). The market cap for tokenized RWAs on XRPL soared 124% quarter-over-quarter to an all-time high of $2.25 billion. That surge was fueled by new institutional-oriented DeFi infrastructure that went live in Q1: permissioned domains, a permissioned decentralized exchange, and a token escrow feature. These tools let regulated entities issue, trade, and lock assets on XRPL without exposing them to the unpermissioned open market. Native lending protocols and asset vaults, however, remained stuck in a voting stage as of Q1 — leaving a key piece of DeFi functionality still pending.
The contrast between XRP's price slide and the network's underlying growth raises an open question. For now, the market is selling the token while builders keep adding rails. Whether those rails eventually support a price recovery — or remain a niche for tokenized securities and stablecoins — will depend on whether the lending and vault proposals pass the next vote.
