The XRP Ledger experienced a decline in active accounts during the second quarter relative to the previous year, yet the accounts maintaining activity on its primary exchange transferred nearly triple the amount of XRP.
Daily order-book transactions averaged 3.57 million XRP throughout the period, reflecting a 79% surge year-over-year. Concurrently, the quantity of accounts executing those trades dropped from above 1,860 to roughly 1,100 per day.
According to a quarterly report supplied to CoinDesk by Evernorth, an XRP treasury firm preparing for a Nasdaq listing, this translated to approximately 3,200 XRP moved per account daily, compared to about 1,070 a year prior.
Because a single entity or trading desk can operate multiple accounts, an account does not equal a unique person. Consequently, the metrics cannot confirm whether institutional players are supplanting retail participants—though they do signify that transaction activity is now concentrated among a smaller subset of active accounts.
The quantity of assets paired against XRP on the order book declined to an average of 319 daily, down 18% compared to the prior year and hitting the lowest point across the six quarters tracked in the study.
Furthermore, the order book claimed a larger portion of volume on the network’s decentralized exchange, or DEX—where individuals trade peer-to-peer via the ledger rather than through centralized platforms like Binance or Coinbase. It represented 81% of DEX trading activity during the quarter, increasing from 54% in the same period last year.
Overall DEX volume averaged 4.42 million XRP daily, which marks a roughly 20% increase year-over-year while remaining 16% under the figures recorded in the first quarter of 2026.
More value, fewer accounts
During the quarter, tokenized assets averaged $3.72 billion, representing more than double the first-quarter figures and exceeding thirty times the volume from a year before. Factoring in average RLUSD holdings of $539 million, the aggregate capital maintained on the network reached roughly $4.26 billion.
Just six quarters prior, that metric stood at a mere $99 million.
Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, drove a substantial portion of this expansion. The average supply circulating on the XRP Ledger climbed over 600% to reach $539 million compared to $73 million a year earlier, while the total value transferred through RLUSD expanded by more than nine times. This performance elevated the ledger’s proportion of the total circulating RLUSD supply from 20% to 34%.
Read More: Ripple’s RLUSD gets two boosts as transfer volume drops 25%
This growth transpired despite contractions across several user engagement metrics.
Transacting accounts on the XRP Ledger averaged about 16,600 per day in Q2, registering a 24% year-over-year drop. Newly created accounts likewise fell by approximately 25% to 2,800 daily.
Nevertheless, this contraction was not unique to the XRP Ledger. Across the broader cryptocurrency landscape, onchain exchange volumes shrank by 46% year-over-year during the same timeframe, while transaction fees across the seven largest programmable networks fell by 38%.
Infrastructure built for bigger money
These structural shifts coincided with the deployment of tools tailored to enhance the utility of the XRP Ledger for institutional financial entities.
In May, a segment of a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund underwent redemption, with the asset leg executing settlement on the XRP Ledger in under five seconds. Permissioned domains—which empower institutions to restrict market participation to authorized participants—received upgrades during the quarter alongside the network’s multi-purpose token features.
CoinDesk reported in August concerning proposed protocol modifications intended to introduce confidentiality features to tokenized instruments on the ledger, keeping individual balances and transfers private while preserving targeted access rights for issuers, auditors, or regulators.
Additionally, the network’s Ethereum-compatible sidechain transitioned to actively maintained software during the quarter, and RLUSD broadened its availability across multiple alternative blockchains.
Concurrently, U.S. spot XRP exchange-traded funds pulled in $273 million throughout the quarter, achieving net positive inflows across all three months and establishing an institutional investment channel that bypasses direct token custody. Furthermore, the CLARITY Act—legislation designed to clarify whether assets like XRP fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC or the CFTC—successfully passed out of the Senate Banking Committee on May 14.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/05/xrp-ledger-has-fewer-active-accounts-but-bigger-trades-and-more-value.
