XRP Ledger liquidity trends show RLUSD surging 642% as retail traders retreat

A new quarterly report on XRP Ledger liquidity trends shows a network moving bigger money through fewer hands. According to Evernorth Research’s Q2 2026 scorecard, trading on the XRP Ledger got heavier and more concentrated at the same time, even as capital tied to tokenized assets, stablecoins and institutional infrastructure kept building underneath it. The picture that emerges is one of a maturing settlement layer attracting deeper pools of value while everyday retail participation cools off.

Key takeaways

• XRPL decentralized exchange volume averaged 4.42 million XRP per day in Q2 2026, up roughly 20% year over year, while daily active trading accounts fell to about 2,435.
• RLUSD balances on the XRP Ledger jumped 642% year over year to average $539 million, with value moved up 925%, lifting XRPL’s share of total RLUSD supply from 20% to 34%.
• A portion of a tokenized US Treasury fund settled its asset leg on-ledger in under five seconds.
• US spot XRP ETFs pulled in $273 million in net inflows across the quarter, with every single month landing positive.
• The Clarity Act advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee, while a new OCC rule cleared the way for national trust banks to offer crypto custody services.

XRP Ledger Trading Activity and Liquidity in Q2 2026

Trading on the XRP Ledger grew louder but narrower in Q2 2026, with fewer wallets responsible for a larger share of total flow. That single dynamic runs through nearly every data point in Evernorth’s report and defines the quarter’s XRP Ledger liquidity trends more than any single headline number.

Larger Trades, Fewer Active Accounts

The value held on the network averaged $4.26 billion across the quarter, and XRPL DEX trading volume ran at 4.42 million XRP per day, roughly 20% higher than a year earlier. But the number of people driving that volume shrank. Approximately 2,435 accounts traded daily, meaning fewer participants moved more XRP than they had the year before.

Order-book activity told the sharpest version of that story. Order-book trading hit 3.57 million XRP per day, 79% above the same period a year earlier, while the number of accounts initiating those trades fell from 1,864 to 1,111 per day. Divide one by the other and the average account traded 3,217 XRP daily, nearly three times the 1,072 XRP a year prior. The order book now accounts for 81% of all DEX activity, up from 54% a year ago. Sequentially, total trading volume was still 16% below an unusually active Q1 2026. Evernorth points to the network’s institution-facing infrastructure, including permissioned domains and permissioned trading venues that went live in February, as one plausible driver of that concentration, since professional flow tends to move in fewer, larger transactions than retail activity.

Retail Pullback Ripples Across Blockchains

The drop in active accounts was not unique to XRP. Accounts transacting on the ledger averaged 16,587 a day and new account creation averaged 2,783 a day, both down roughly 25% from the prior year. Across the wider crypto market, transaction fees paid across the seven largest programmable networks declined alongside on-chain exchange volume, which dropped 46% year over year — Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism and Avalanche — dropped 38% over the same stretch.

Why this matters: account counts are the most retail-sensitive measure Evernorth tracks, and the broad decline suggests casual traders stepped back across the entire market in Q2, not just on the XRP Ledger. That context matters for reading the ledger’s own numbers fairly — the drop in XRPL wallets looks less like a network-specific problem and more like part of a market-wide retreat.

Infrastructure Upgrades and Protocol Enhancements on the XRP Ledger

Three separate technical updates landed on the XRP Ledger in Q2 2026, each aimed at making the network more usable for institutional and cross-chain activity rather than retail speculation.

EVM Sidechain Migrates to Cosmos EVM

On May 20, the XRPL EVM Core Team and Peersyst shipped version 9.0.0 of the sidechain that runs Ethereum-style smart contracts for XRP. The upgrade moved the sidechain off Evmos, software no longer actively maintained, onto Cosmos EVM, and added support for current Ethereum standards, lowering the cost of building applications on top of it. A week later, on May 27, the XRP Ledger Foundation activated the fixCleanup3_1_3 amendment on-ledger, hardening permissioned domains and multi-purpose tokens that had already gone live in February, alongside vault and lending code that validators are still evaluating separately.

RLUSD Stablecoin Growth Goes Multichain

RLUSD’s expansion was the quarter’s clearest liquidity signal. Balances on the XRP Ledger averaged $539 million, up from just $73 million a year earlier — a 642% increase — while the value moved through RLUSD climbed 925%. That pushed XRPL’s overall share of total RLUSD supply from 20% to 34%, even as stablecoin market capitalization across the wider industry contracted for the first time since 2023. On June 4, RLUSD went multichain through Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers standard, moving natively rather than as a wrapped token across Base, Optimism, Ink, Unichain and the XRPL EVM sidechain, in addition to its existing presence on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. This kind of RLUSD stablecoin growth matters because deeper, more mobile stablecoin balances directly expand the size of payments and tokenized-asset transactions the ledger can settle.

Tokenized Asset Settlement Speeds Up

One of the quarter’s most concrete demonstrations of what deeper liquidity can actually do came from a tokenized US Treasury transaction. A portion of a tokenized US Treasury fund settled its asset leg on-ledger in under five seconds. That figure describes only the on-chain portion of the transaction, not full end-to-end bank settlement, but it is still a striking contrast to the days that traditional Treasury redemptions can take through conventional custodial channels.

Why this matters: fast, verifiable settlement on tokenized real-world assets is the kind of use case institutional players cite when explaining why they are experimenting with blockchain rails at all. Combined with RLUSD’s growth and the network’s expanding permissioned infrastructure, the Treasury redemption points to a ledger increasingly positioned around institutional settlement rather than retail speculation.

US Regulatory Developments Impacting XRP Ledger and Crypto Markets

Capital flows and Washington policy moved in the same direction during Q2 2026, reinforcing the broader shift toward institutional adoption visible in the ledger’s own data.

ETFs, OCC Rule and the Clarity Act Advance Together

US spot XRP ETFs accumulated $273 million in net inflows across the quarter, according to SoSoValue data, with positive flows in every single month without a single monthly outflow. On the regulatory front, an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency rule amending federal trust bank regulations took effect April 1, affirming that national trust banks may engage in non-fiduciary activities including custody and safekeeping — though the rule does not address digital assets specifically, leaving some interpretive ambiguity for crypto custody. Separately, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act advanced out of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on May 14, marking a legislative step that market participants have watched closely as a signal of where broader XRP Ledger regulatory updates and crypto market structure rules may be heading.

Taken together, steady ETF inflows, a custody-friendly OCC rule and legislative movement on market structure suggest institutional interest in XRP and its underlying infrastructure did not fade even as retail trading activity across the market pulled back sharply. Whether that institutional base can eventually offset the account declines seen in Q2 is the question Evernorth’s next quarterly scorecard will likely have to answer.

FAQ

How did trading activity on the XRP Ledger change in Q2 2026?

Trading saw larger average trades but fewer active accounts, with daily trading volume on the XRPL decentralized exchange up 20% year over year to 4.42 million XRP per day.

What infrastructure upgrades occurred on the XRP Ledger in Q2 2026?

The XRPL EVM sidechain migrated to actively maintained Cosmos EVM software, a protocol amendment hardened permissioned domains and multi-purpose tokens, and RLUSD stablecoin expanded to multiple chains through Wormhole.

What regulatory developments affected the XRP Ledger and US crypto markets in Q2 2026?

US spot XRP ETFs accumulated $273 million in net inflows, a new OCC rule allowed national trust banks to engage in custody and non-fiduciary activities, and the Clarity Act advanced with a favorable Senate Banking Committee vote.

How fast was the settlement of the tokenized US Treasury fund portion on the XRP Ledger?

A portion of a tokenized US Treasury fund settled its asset leg on-ledger in under five seconds, though this covers only the on-chain portion of the transaction rather than full bank settlement.

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