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XRP a ‘Different Network’ as Retail Traders Exit and Big Players Take Over
- Daily active accounts on the XRP Ledger halved in 2025, but per-user volumes, fees, and liquidity increased, indicating a shift from retail to larger, institutional activity.
- Payments now dominate XRPL activity (99.7%), with rising transfer sizes, suggesting its “gentrification” into a wholesale settlement rail rather than a retail trading platform.
- XRP recently hit an all-time high of US$3.5, with soaring Open Interest, despite the decline in casual users, although it has since pulled back slightly.
The price of XRP has been on a tear lately, but the same cannot be said for the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
Analytics firm Serotonin told Decrypt that daily active accounts on the XRPL have collapsed by roughly half in 2025, from about 39,500 on 1 January to nearly 19,500 on 29 June.
Meanwhile per-user volumes, fee loads, and liquidity commitments have climbed.
Daily user counts have fallen sharply, while per-user metrics such as volume, fee load and liquidity provision have climbed, suggesting that casual participants are leaving but the capital that remains is being deployed more intensively.
Serotonin’s Senior growth analytics manager, Paige Horinek. Payments now account for up to 99.7 % of on-ledger throughput; decentralised-exchange trades and swaps never breach 1 %, erasing the speculative traces typically linked to small traders.
Rising transfer sizes and higher total value locked per automated-market-maker wallet round out what Horinek calls XRP’s gentrification “into wholesale settlement rails”. The pivot jars with XRP’s longstanding retail mythology: the self-styled “XRP Army” that carried the token through an ongoing legal fight with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Related: Retail Traders Can Still Ride Crypto’s Classic Waves, Says Coinstash Co‑Founder
The Hype is Building
XRP recently hit an all-time high, hitting US$3.5 (AU$5.43) a week ago. Open Interest (OI) for the coin has also skyrocketed, reaching over US$10.5B (AU$16.22B).
But as the hype for XRP’s price grows, so does the amount of scams out there. Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse warned holders to steer clear of a spike in YouTube scams that followed XRP’s climb to the third-largest crypto by market capitalisation.
But all in all, it seems like the market euphoria has cooled a bit. A broader altcoin pull-back on Wednesday shaved double-digit percentages off major tokens; XRP slipped to US$3.11 (AU$4.72), down about 13% from its new high.
Serotonin’s report frames the shift bluntly:
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For retail traders, the playground is shrinking; for institutions, XRP increasingly resembles an interbank settlement network. Whether this wholesale pivot ultimately adds or destroys value remains an open question, but it’s a different network than it was a year ago.
Serotonin Related: SEC Fast‑Tracks, Then Freezes Bitwise’s Crypto Index ETF Conversion
Author
José Oramas
José is a journalist and translator with a keen interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
