XRP’s $539 Million RLUSD Burn and $1.4 Billion ETF Flood: A Tokenized Future vs. a Stubborn Price
Published on 06/23/2026 at 16:44 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
Ripple has taken a hatchet to its own stablecoin supply, torching RLUSD tokens worth more than half a billion dollars in recent weeks. The company retired $539 million of the asset since late May, with nearly 75% of that destruction occurring on Ethereum. The move marks a deliberate pivot away from external blockchains as Ripple channels liquidity onto its native XRP Ledger, where it minted roughly $228 million in new RLUSD during the same period. Analysts link the strategy to Europe’s upcoming MiCA regulatory framework, which Ripple appears intent on meeting by consolidating stablecoin activity within its own ecosystem.
The retreat from Ethereum comes at a time when institutional demand for XRP-linked products is hitting new highs. Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley confirmed that the firm’s XRP ETFs in the US and Europe have together pulled in over $200 million in net inflows. Bitwise’s product alone commands a market cap of roughly $257 million, contributing to a global spot-XRP ETF market that has swelled past $722 million. Weekly data for the period ending June 22 shows Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ leading the charge with $6.7 million, followed by Bitwise at $4 million. Since the first US-based spot XRP ETFs launched in late 2025, cumulative inflows have reached $1.43 billion. Morgan Stanley has also disclosed holdings in XRP-based instruments. A pilot on May 6 — involving Ripple, JPMorgan and Mastercard — demonstrated settlement of tokenized US Treasuries on the XRP Ledger in roughly five seconds, a process that typically takes three to five working days. Tokenized real-world assets on the ledger hit $3.57 billion in June, up 14% in 30 days, as the number of institutional holders surged 96% to 110.
On the technical side, the network’s upgrade to version 3.2.0 rolled out in mid-June, but adoption has been sluggish. Only 26% of nodes have installed the update, which renames the core software from “rippled” to “xrpld” to decouple the infrastructure from the Ripple corporate brand. Operators have reported synchronization errors and transaction relay issues, though no full network outage has occurred. Developers are urging the remaining validators to migrate quickly. The update also incorporates security patches identified by external auditor Common Prefix, as well as the x402 protocol — a toolkit that enables automated payments by artificial-intelligence agents. Ripple is simultaneously working with Project Eleven on quantum-resistant security mechanisms.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying XRP?
None of this momentum has translated into a higher XRP price. The token trades near $1.10, down roughly 41% year-to-date and about 70% below its July 2025 peak of $3.65. The 50-week and 200-day moving averages sit well overhead at $1.54 and $1.78, respectively. The relative-strength index hovers in the mid-30s — technically near oversold territory but not yet flashing a clear reversal signal. If XRP closes a daily session below $1.09, the next support zone sits at $0.95, according to technical analysts. The 30-day loss stands at nearly 19%.
Yet a handful of bright spots temper the bearish picture. Last week alone, roughly $11 million flowed into XRP-based spot ETFs, and daily active addresses on the XRP Ledger hit 215,000 in early June, the highest since March — a sign that network usage is growing even as the price languishes. The question is whether the institutional dollars pouring in through ETFs and tokenized assets will eventually outweigh the selling pressure that has kept XRP pinned below the $1.50 level for months.
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