Ripple’s $50 Billion Valuation Clashes With XRP’s 60% Slide
As Ripple completes major acquisitions and a share buyback, the XRP token struggles under supply pressure and reduced utility from the RLUSD stablecoin.
Ripple has significantly expanded its institutional footprint, completing a $750 million share buyback at a $50 billion valuation and acquiring prime brokerage Hidden Road for $1.25 billion and treasury platform GTreasury for $1 billion. This corporate growth, representing a 25% increase in valuation over several months, stands in stark contrast to the performance of the XRP token, which has fallen approximately 60% from its July peak.
The divergence between the company’s operational success and the token’s market decline challenges the traditional narrative that increased adoption of Ripple’s infrastructure automatically drives demand for XRP. While Ripple continues to secure partnerships with major financial institutions, the token has not recorded a positive monthly performance since September, suggesting that corporate metrics are no longer directly correlated with asset price action.
A primary factor in this decoupling is the strategic introduction of the RLUSD stablecoin. Banks and financial institutions, which have historically been wary of holding volatile assets for settlement purposes, increasingly prefer RLUSD for cross-border payments. Ripple’s website now prominently features RLUSD as the primary method for integrating stablecoin payments, reducing the reliance on XRP as a bridge asset in its cross-border payment system.
Supply-side dynamics further weigh on the token’s value. Ripple continues to unlock 1 billion XRP monthly, with approximately 38 billion tokens remaining in escrow as of 2026. Although the company typically relocks 70% to 80% of these monthly unlocks, hundreds of millions of tokens still enter circulation every 30 days, creating persistent supply pressure that contrasts with the company’s growing institutional revenue streams.
Analysts note that Ripple’s core messaging and settlement layer, which is widely used by banks, does not interact with XRP at all. Consequently, the value created by Ripple’s expanding global financial infrastructure may not translate into long-term gains for the token. The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor analyst team recently excluded XRP from their list of 10 best stocks for investors, citing the likelihood that the token will underperform as the company leans further into stablecoin solutions.
