Have you ever watched something you believed in start to quietly fade right in front of your eyes?
That’s exactly how a lot of XRP holders are feeling this week. The price sits at $2.21, down a brutal 40% from its 2025 peak, and the on-chain numbers that used to scream “adoption” are now barely whispering. It’s the kind of slow-motion correction that hurts more than a flash crash, because every day brings fresh evidence that the momentum might really be gone.
The XRP Ledger Is Running on Fumes
Let’s not sugar-coat it: the core health metrics of the XRP Ledger have taken a nosedive in November.
Daily payment counts that were comfortably above 1.2 million earlier this month have collapsed to just 451,000. Active addresses? Down from 254,000 to under 100,000. Even the number of accounts actually doing something meaningful on any given day has slipped below 20,000.
In crypto, network activity is oxygen. When it drops this sharply, price usually follows — and often with a vengeance.
Token Burn — The Deflation Story That Stopped Burning
Remember when the community loved to point at the “deflationary pressure” from transaction fee burns? Yeah… that story has gone quiet too.
Back in August we were seeing peaks above 5,000 XRP burned per day. Yesterday? Fewer than 500. At current prices that’s barely $1,100 worth of tokens leaving circulation daily. Hardly the supply-shock engine people were banking on.
“Burn rate follows usage. When the network goes quiet, so does the burn.”
— Common observation among long-time XRPL watchers
Real-World Assets and DeFi TVL Tell the Same Story
Ripple spent years positioning the XRPL as the go-to chain for tokenized real-world assets and cross-border payments, and institutional settlement. The total value locked today? A modest $207 million. That puts it in tenth place — behind chains most retail traders have never even heard of.
When your narrative is “we’re built for institutions” but the institutions aren’t showing up in the data, the market eventually notices.
The One Bright Spot Everyone Clings To
There is, of course, one metric still flashing green: Ripple’s own stablecoin, RLUSD.
Market cap has exploded past $1.2 billion, up over 90% in the last 30 days alone. That’s real growth, and it proves the plumbing still works when someone actually decides to use it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth — stablecoin volume doesn’t move the native token price the same way that payment volume or DeFi activity does. USDT is worth $130 billion and nobody is getting rich holding Tron or Ethereum just because of Tether issuance.
Wall Street vs On-Chain Reality
And then we have the bizarre disconnect with the newly launched spot XRP ETFs in the United States.
Wednesday saw another $21 million of inflows, pushing cumulative flows above $643 million. Institutional desks are voting with their dollars that XRP belongs in portfolios. Retail, meanwhile, is voting with their feet — out of the token and apparently out of the network too.
I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that Wall Street money can keep a price afloat for months, sometimes years, after on-chain fundamentals have turned south (looking at you, 2019–2020). But eventually gravity wins.
Technical Picture — Ugly and Getting Uglier
Flip to the daily chart and there’s really no sugar-coating it either.
- XRP is printing lower highs and lower lows since the July $3.66 top
- Price remains below the 50-day and 100-day EMAsli>
- The Supertrend indicator flipped bearish weeks ago and hasn’t looked backli>
- Volume on up days is pathetic compared to distribution daysli>
The only real support left on the chart is the November low around $1.81. A clean break below that opens the door to $1.50 and potentially the $1.30 zone — levels not seen since the 2024 bull run really kicked off.
That would be roughly another 16–18% downside from where we sit right now. And given the on-chain backdrop, I wouldn’t bet against it.
So Is There Any Bull Case Left?
Of course there is — there always is.
- A sudden regulatory green light or major bank announcement could ignite usage overnightli>
- RLUSD continuing to grow could eventually pull real payment volume back onto XRPLli>
- ETF inflows could accelerate if Bitcoin keeps pushing toward $100k and portfolio managers rotate into “the next big alt”li>
- The chart could form a higher low here and start a massive inverse head-and-shoulders into 2026li>
But right now those feel more like hopium than high-probability setups. The data we have in hand — network usage cratering while price makes lower lows — points in one direction.
What I’m Watching Personally
If I were still holding a bag (I’m not, I learned my lesson in 2018), these would be my personal tripwires:
- Daily transactions sustainably back above 1 million — real sign of life
- Active addresses recovering toward 200k+
- Price reclaiming the 50-day EMA (~$2.55) with expanding volume
- Token burn rate climbing again (means real usage, not just speculation)
Until at least two of those happen, I struggle to get constructive on XRP from a risk-reward perspective.
Look, I’ve been wrong before — plenty of times. Maybe the ETF flows really do create a floor and the network metrics are nothing more than a mid-cycle lull. But when the ledger itself is this quiet while price is already down 40%, experience says be careful chasing the bounce.
Sometimes the chain speaks louder than the marketing deck. And right now, the XRP Ledger is whispering one thing:
“Prove we’re still relevant.”
Until it shouts again, the path of least resistance for price looks lower.
Stay sharp out there.
