XRP’s $1 billion ETF record is misleading, and one hidden flow metric explains why price remains stagnant

XRP spot ETFs have crossed $1 billion in assets under management, with about $1.14 billion spread across five issuers. Net inflows since Nov. 14 sit near $423.27 million.

On the same CoinGlass dashboard, XRP itself sits around $1.88, with a market cap of $114.11 billion and about $382.14 million of 24-hour spot volume.

If your mental model is the Bitcoin ETF era, where “wrapper demand” and “price repricing” felt welded together, that combination can read like a punchline.

But it isn’t.

It’s a reminder that ETFs don’t magically lift prices. They route demand through a fairly specific set of pipes.

Unless those pipes are pulling real supply out of the market faster than it’s coming back in, you can hit an impressive AUM milestone while the underlying asset trades like it has other drivers.

The simplest way to frame the disconnect is this: readers see “AUM” and assume it means new buying.

But the lever that matters most for price isn’t the headline AUM number. It’s the pace and persistence of net creations, when fresh cash forces authorized participants to source underlying XRP, issue new shares, and park that XRP inside the fund wrapper where it won’t churn like a retail wallet.

Once you start separating AUM from net creations, the story stops being mysterious and starts being mechanical.

That’s good news, because mechanics are something you can actually watch.

AUM is the billboard, creations do the work

AUM can climb for reasons that have nothing to do with fresh demand arriving that week.

If XRP rallies, the ETF wrapper’s AUM rises right along with it. If market makers seed inventory at launch, AUM can start out looking chunky before the slow grind of everyday allocations even begins.

Even secondary-market trading, busy, headline-friendly volume, can mostly be investors swapping existing ETF shares back and forth without forcing any new XRP to be purchased.

Net creations are different. They’re the part of the ETF machine that has to touch the underlying asset in a direct way.

CoinGlass’s own breakdown gives you a clean way into the math.

If AUM is about $1.14 billion and inflows since mid-November are about $423.27 million, then a big slice of that AUM is, by definition, something other than new cash arriving in the last several weeks.

That “something” can be early positioning, seeded inventory, and market moves, all real, all legitimate, just not the same thing as steady incremental buying that tightens tradable supply.

Now translate AUM into coins and float, because that’s where ETF stories either get sharp or get sloppy.

At roughly $1.88 per XRP, $1.14 billion equates to roughly 600 million XRP held through these ETFs, give or take.

Put that next to a circulating supply near 60.67 billion XRP and you land around 1% of circulating supply sitting in the wrappers.

1% matters. It’s a real warehouse, it broadens access, and it creates a new class of holders.

But it’s also not the kind of share-of-float that forces a one-way squeeze on its own.

Bitcoin is the clean comparator because its ETF era trained readers to expect immediate, visible repricing.

By the end of 2025, US spot Bitcoin ETFs held about 1,298,757 BTC, which works out to about 6.185% of Bitcoin’s 21 million cap.

That ratio is a big part of why Bitcoin’s wrapper story can feel so linear: pull enough float into structures that don’t day-trade, and the remaining liquid supply has to clear at higher prices when demand stays steady.

XRP’s wrapper footprint is smaller, so the mechanical “warehouse effect” is smaller, too.

That’s before you factor in how much of the $1.14 billion is the result of market moves rather than fresh net creations.

Even the pace of inflows frames things in a more sober light.

$423.27 million over roughly 35 days works out to about $12 million a day on average.

In a token that often prints hundreds of millions in daily spot turnover, that’s a steady bid. It can matter at the margin, but it’s not automatically the dominant force in price discovery.

This is also where big debut-day numbers can mislead.

Canary’s spot XRP ETF (XRPC) reportedly drew more than $46 million in first-day trading, with Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas flagging about $26 million of volume in the first 30 minutes.

Those figures tell you the wrapper launched with real attention and tradability, which is exactly what you want if you’re building an ETF category.

But they don’t tell you how many net shares were created, how much of the day was secondary churn, or how much was market makers recycling inventory.

So the first ETF lesson, the one that tends to get lost in the victory laps, is that AUM is a snapshot, while net creations are a flow.

It’s the flow that does the heavy lifting on price.

Escrow cadence and hedge books can mute the bid

Even if you grant that XRP’s ETF story is real and that the wrappers are doing what they’re supposed to do, there’s a second question.

What else is happening in the market at the same time that can absorb that demand without the chart reacting?

With XRP, the supply calendar is part of the answer, and it’s not a small part.

Ripple locked 55 billion XRP into on-ledger escrows and described a mechanism that releases up to 1 billion XRP per month, with unused amounts placed into new escrows.

The practical point isn’t that 1 billion XRP hits the market every month, as it doesn’t.

It’s that traders live with a known, recurring cadence, which shapes how liquidity providers quote risk and how aggressively they chase price when demand arrives.

A market that expects supply to appear on schedule tends to price rallies differently than a market that thinks supply is scarce and unpredictable.

Then there’s the legal frame, which got clearer in 2025 but didn’t turn XRP into a frictionless institutional asset overnight.

The SEC ended its lawsuit against Ripple in August 2025, leaving a $125 million fine intact and an injunction tied to institutional sales.

That removes one cloud, and it matters. But it also leaves behind a record that makes distribution and access a topic that never fully goes away, especially for buyers who care about how an asset is treated across venues and jurisdictions.

Now layer in the part that most retail traders never see clearly: hedging.

ETF creations don’t arrive as pure, unhedged spot buying.

Authorized participants and market makers hedge their exposure as they source inventory, manage timing, and arbitrage differences between venues and products.

That often means buying spot XRP while also shorting futures or perps to stay neutral, or to lock in the spread they’re being paid to capture.

When that hedge layer is deep, a chunk of what feels like demand gets met with synthetic selling that keeps the spot chart from reacting in the way readers expect.

In 2025, that hedge toolkit got more familiar to institutional desks.

CME said it would launch cash-settled XRP futures on May 19, 2025, pending regulatory approval.

That matters less as a headline and more as a bridge into the kind of risk management that big firms already use in other assets.

On CoinGlass, XRP derivatives activity already looks large enough to carry real hedging: open interest around $3.40 billion and 24-hour futures volume around $2.56 billion.

That’s plenty of room for ETF-related hedges to lean against spot demand, especially when the market’s in a mood where people would rather rent exposure than hold it outright.

Venue mix matters too, because liquidity isn’t just “how much volume prints,” but also “where the marginal buyer and seller are actually meeting.”

Kaiko wrote in April 2025 that XRP’s spot volume was heavily concentrated offshore, while its share of spot volume on US exchanges had climbed to its highest level since the wave of delistings tied to the SEC’s 2021 lawsuit period.

Offshore concentration can deliver raw liquidity, but it can also diffuse price discovery across fragmented pools, each with its own participant mix, fee schedules, and hedging behavior.

That makes it easier for flows in one wrapper to get absorbed without the spot chart reacting like a billboard.

That broader context also shows up in the simple chart history

XRP closed near $1.88 on Jan. 1, 2026.

In 2025, it printed a closing high around $3.55 on July 22 and a closing low around $1.80 on April 8.

That puts the drawdown from the July closing peak to the start of 2026 at roughly 47%.

In a market that’s lived through that kind of round trip in a few months, buyers tend to take profits faster, sellers tend to show up sooner, and liquidity can feel thick right up until the moment it isn’t.

Spot volume over the last month sat below the 2025 daily average, and realized volatility over the last 90 days ran high.

That’s exactly the cocktail that makes price behave erratically even when the news looks clean.

Put all of this together, and the fact price has been relatively flat stops looking like a contradiction.

A $1.14 billion wrapper that represents about 1% of circulating supply can coexist with a flat or choppy chart when net creations are steady but not dominant.

That’s especially true when a known escrow cadence keeps supply expectations anchored, when hedges in perps and futures meet spot buying in real time, and when liquidity is spread across venues rather than concentrated in one deep onshore pool.

What would make the link between XRP ETF growth and spot price feel tighter, the way it often did for Bitcoin, is also straightforward.

You’d need net creations to accelerate enough to outpace routine sell flow.

You’d need some of the hedge layer to unwind instead of piling on, and you’d need a deeper, cleaner onshore liquidity base where marginal demand has fewer frictions and fewer detours.

In other words, you’d need the wrappers to stop being a new access point and start being a relentless vacuum.

Until then, $1 billion in XRP ETFs is still worth taking seriously, just for different reasons than the quick thrill of a one-day repricing.

It says the wrapper category has crossed the line from novelty to habit.

It says advisers and brokerage accounts now have a simple way to hold XRP without juggling wallets and venues.

And it says that when the market mood turns friendlier and flows pick up, the infrastructure for a bigger move is already there.

The pipes exist.

Right now, they’re moving water, not forcing a flood.