XRP is back hovering just above the $1 line, and the pressure isn’t coming from a new lawsuit or a surprise exchange move. It’s coming from Capitol Hill, where the Senate has pushed consideration of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act beyond its August 7 recess—leaving mid-September as the earliest plausible window for floor action, according to docs.
That delay has started showing up in the only scoreboard that really matters for institutions: flows. One set of data points to a sharp cooling in U.S. spot XRP ETF demand after a stronger spring, with monthly inflows falling from May into June and July.
Zooming into the weekly picture, we can see the inflows dropping roughly 93% week-over-week to about $1 million—making XRP an outlier while Bitcoin and Ethereum products pulled in far larger sums over the same period.
Policy gridlock meets a very real $1 support test
The CLARITY Act has been through major steps already—passing the House in 2025 and advancing out of the Senate Banking Committee in 2026—but it still needs scarce Senate floor time and, likely, bipartisan support to clear procedural hurdles. The same coverage flags internal friction points, including objections tied to stablecoin provisions and ethics language.
For XRP, the practical issue is timing. Asset managers may be reluctant to scale exposure while regulatory status is shaped by guidance and interpretations rather than statutory law. That’s an awkward backdrop for a token trading near a psychological support level that has become a market narrative in its own right.
Whales bought the dip while institutions hesitated
On-chain indicators complicate the bearish read. Wallet cohorts holding 100 million to 1 billion XRP increased their share of supply earlier in the week, according to Santiment data. Smaller large holders (10 million to 100 million XRP) reportedly flipped back to buying on August 6—the same day the daily ETF tape turned positive after earlier outflows and ultra-flat sessions.
Meanwhile, Glassnode’s data also showed a shift that day, with XRP moving off exchanges after several days of net inflows—often read as accumulation.
The signal is messy but actionable: XRP’s near-term price behavior is getting tethered to legislative tempo, while positioning splits between institutional wrappers and on-chain whales. If the Senate calendar stays crowded, the $1 area may remain less a “technical level” than a referendum on whether Washington can deliver clarity on crypto at all.
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