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XRP’s futures market just took a serious hit. Open interest fell roughly $700 million in a matter of weeks, even as the XRP Ledger quietly builds what looks like a meaningful institutional base.
The numbers are pretty stark. Per CoinGlass, XRP futures open interest slid from nearly $3 billion in June down to about $2.3 billion by mid-July. Binance felt it hardest — open interest on that exchange alone dropped from over $500 million in mid-June to $399 million by July 10, according to CryptoQuant. Long liquidations jumped 94% from the prior week and were sitting 172% above their three-month average. Short liquidations, by contrast, fell by more than half. So bulls got squeezed badly while bears mostly stayed safe.
Funding rates told a weird story, though.
XRP funding rates on Binance actually rose 266% during the same stretch. That means bullish traders are paying higher premiums to keep their long positions open — even as the market contracts around them. It’s a bit of a contradiction. Traders seem reluctant to fully abandon the bullish thesis, but the overall pool of money in XRP futures is clearly shrinking fast.
Spot ETF Outflows Break a Nine-Week Streak
On the spot side, U.S. XRP exchange-traded funds saw net outflows of about $7.2 million for the week ending July 10, according to SoSoValue. That snapped a nine-week inflow streak that had piled up nearly $200 million. The outflow ranks among the five largest for XRP funds this year — not catastrophic, but notable given how consistent the inflows had been.
Cumulative net inflows are still sitting at $1.48 billion, and fund assets were close to $1 billion by the end of that week. So it’s not a collapse. But the momentum clearly shifted.
Meanwhile, XRPL’s own user activity is sending mixed signals. Santiment put XRPL at its second-quietest day of the year, with only 25,350 active wallets on a single day. New wallet creation dropped to 2,130 — the lowest reading since November 2024. That’s a meaningful drop, especially after a brief pickup in activity in late June.
But here’s the thing: the wallets that are active are doing more. Transactions using source tags — the kind exchanges and payment providers typically use — rose 28.6%. The number of distinct source tags grew 13%. So the network isn’t dead, it’s just concentrating. Retail and casual users seem to be stepping back while established services keep running.
Transaction counts overall were up roughly 3% to 4% week-over-week and month-over-month, though they’re still about 21% below the three-month average. The network-value-to-transactions ratio has eased a bit, which probably means things are stabilizing after earlier declines. Probably. It’s still murky.
XRPL’s $4 Billion Institutional Pipeline
Strip away the short-term noise and there’s a bigger story building on the ledger side. Evernorth, a digital-asset treasury company, says about $4 billion in tokenized real-world assets are now tied to XRPL, spread across more than 500 products. That’s a big number for a blockchain that doesn’t always get the institutional headlines that Ethereum does.
And the development roadmap is clearly aimed at pulling in more of that institutional money. The proposed XLS-96 standard would bring confidential transfers to XRPL’s Multi-Purpose Tokens, using encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to keep transaction details private on what is otherwise a public ledger. Selective disclosure is part of the proposal too — issuers could share transaction data with regulators and auditors without broadcasting it publicly. The proposal also keeps existing control tools like freezing and clawback functions intact for confidential assets.
For institutions, that matters a lot. Banks and asset managers aren’t thrilled about competitors seeing every transaction in real time. Public blockchains have always had that problem, and XLS-96 is basically a direct answer to it.
Ondo Finance, Ripple, and Kinexys have already shown what XRPL can do for cross-border transactions. The practical use cases are there. The question is whether the privacy upgrade accelerates broader adoption or stays theoretical for a while longer. Unclear yet.
What’s clear is the gap between the retail-facing futures market and the institutional-facing ledger development. One’s contracting. The other’s growing. Whether those two trends converge — whether institutional traction eventually pulls futures interest back up — isn’t something the current data settles.
Evernorth’s $4 billion figure and 500-plus tokenized products are the most concrete sign of where XRPL’s real momentum sits right now.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much did XRP futures open interest fall and over what period?
Per CoinGlass, XRP futures open interest dropped from nearly $3 billion in June to about $2.3 billion by mid-July, a decline of roughly $700 million.
What is the XLS-96 standard proposed for XRPL?
XLS-96 is a proposed standard that would add confidential transfers to XRPL’s Multi-Purpose Tokens using encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, with selective disclosure for regulators and auditors.
