XRP (XRP) price has fallen 50% over the past year, even as activity on its network climbs toward record highs. The flood of money behind that activity may be part of the reason the price keeps struggling to recover.
The driver is RLUSD, Ripple's stablecoin, a token built to hold a steady value near one US dollar. It is pulling fresh money onto the network, deepening the pools where XRP trades, while doing little to lift demand for the token itself. That shift has become a recurring thread in recent Ripple news.
XRP Price and Network Activity Have Split Apart
To understand why XRP is dropping even as its network grows, let us view one split in the data. For most of the past two years, on-chain activity moved loosely with the price. Usage climbed during rallies and faded during selloffs, and a correlation check over that period confirms the link.
Want more token insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya's Daily Crypto Newsletter here.
Activity on the network's decentralized exchange (DEX), a marketplace that settles trades directly on-chain without a central middleman, scores about +0.6 against price.
One metric breaks the pattern. Liquidity sitting in automated market maker (AMM) pools shows almost no positive link to price, and recently it has moved in the opposite direction.
An AMM lets people trade against a shared pool of deposited funds rather than against another trader, so the size of those pools reflects committed capital more than daily speculation. That single divergence is where the story begins.
Through 2026, the price has trended steadily lower, falling about 22% in the most recent two-month stretch, and the current XRP price now sits near its weakest level in a year, a decline that has dominated recent XRP news. The pools have done the opposite. Total value locked (TVL), the combined worth of all funds deposited across the AMM pools, more than tripled over the same window. Money kept arriving even as the token lost value.
Native DEX volume points the same way. Daily trading on the network's on-chain exchange in 2026 has run at roughly three times its 2024 average, a steady climb that ignored the falling price. The build-up is not random, and it traces back to one asset arriving on the network in size.
RLUSD now anchors the second-largest AMM pool on the network, with only one pool holding more XRP. Its broader footprint is large.
Supply on the network sits near $785 million across about 45,500 holders, after jumping nearly 30% in a single month.