The XRP Spot ETF has over $1 billion in assets under management, with approximately $1.14 billion spread across five issuers. Net inflows since Nov. 14 are nearly $423.27 million.
In the same CoinGlass dashboard, XRP itself is priced at around $1.88, with a market cap of $114.1 billion and 24-hour spot volume of around $382.14 million.
If your mental model is from the Bitcoin ETF era, and you feel like “wrapper demand” and “repricing” are merging, the combination may read like a punchline.
But that’s not the case.
This is a reminder that ETFs don’t magically increase prices. These route demand through a fairly specialized set of pipes.
Unless these pipes are pulling real supply out of the market faster than they can come back into the market, impressive AUM milestones could be reached while the underlying asset trades like any other factor.
The simplest way to explain the disconnect is: Readers see “AUM” and assume it means new purchases.
However, the most important factor in price is not the headline amount of assets under management. It is the pace and persistence of net capital generation that requires authorized participants to raise the underlying XRP, issue new shares, and store that XRP within a non-rotating fund wrapper like a retail wallet.
When you start separating AUM from online creations, the story becomes less mystical and more mechanical.
This is good news because the mechanics are something you can actually see.
AUM is a billboard, and creative works do the work.
AUM may rise for reasons unrelated to new demand arriving that week.
As XRP rises, the ETF wrapper’s AUM rises with it. If a market maker seeds inventory at launch, the AUM can start to look large before the slow work of daily allocations begins.
Whether trading in the secondary market or in busy, headline-prone trading volumes, investors can almost always move back and forth between existing ETF shares without being forced to buy new XRP.
Online works are different. These are part of the ETF machine and must have a direct impact on the underlying assets.
CoinGlass’ unique breakdown provides a clear approach to calculations.
Given that AUM is approximately $1.14 billion and inflows since mid-November are approximately $423.27 million, the majority of that AUM is, by definition, non-new cash that has arrived in the past few weeks.
That “something” can be initial positioning, seeded inventory, market movement, etc., all of which are real and legitimate, but they are not the same thing as steady additional purchases that tighten the tradable supply.
This is where the ETF story either gets sharp or sloppy, so we convert AUM to coins and floating exchange rates.
At approximately $1.88 per XRP, $1.14 billion equates to approximately 600 million XRP held through these ETFs.
If you put this next to a circulating supply of nearly 60.67 billion XRP, that means about 1% of the circulating supply remains within the wrapper.
1% matters. This is a real warehouse, expanding access and creating a new class of owners.
However, it is not the type of free-floating stock that itself imposes unilateral pressure.
Bitcoin is an obvious comparison because in the ETF era, readers were trained to expect immediate and visible reprices.
By the end of 2025, the US Spot Bitcoin ETF will hold approximately 1,298,757 BTC, which is approximately 6.185% of Bitcoin’s 21 million cap.
This ratio is a big part of why the Bitcoin wrapper story feels so linear. If you draw enough float into a non-day trading structure and demand is stable, the remaining liquid supply should be liquidated at a higher price.
Because XRP’s wrapper footprint is small, the mechanical “warehousing effect” is also small.
That’s before considering how much of the $1.14 billion was the result of market movements rather than net new creation.
Even the pace of influx puts things in a more sober perspective.
$423.27 million was spent over approximately 35 days, which equates to an average of approximately $12 million per day.
This is a solid bid amount for a token that often prints hundreds of millions of dollars in spot sales per day. While it can be important on the margins, it does not automatically become the dominant force in price discovery.
This is also where big debut date numbers can be misleading.
Canary’s Spot XRP ETF (XRPC) reportedly attracted more than $46 million in its first day of trading, with Bloomberg’s Eric Balciunas recording about $26 million in volume in the first 30 minutes.
These numbers indicate that the rapper was launched with real attention and trade potential. This is exactly what you need if you are building an ETF category.
But we don’t know how much net share was generated, how much of the day was spent in secondary churn, or how much inventory market makers recycled.
The first lesson of ETFs, which is often lost in the victory lap, is that AUM is a snapshot and net creation is a flow.
It is this flow that puts a huge burden on prices.
Escrow pace and hedge book could dampen bidding
Even if we accept that the XRP ETF story is true and that the wrappers are doing what they are supposed to do, there is a second question.
What else is happening in the market at the same time that can absorb that demand without the chart reacting?
For XRP, the supply calendar is part of the answer, and it’s no small part.
Ripple described a mechanism to lock 55 billion XRP in escrow on its ledger and release up to 1 billion XRP every month with unspent amounts placed in a new escrow.
The practical point is not that 1 billion XRP will be hitting the market every month, but that this is not the case.
That is, traders live according to a known, repeating rhythm, which shapes how liquidity providers estimate risk and how aggressively they chase prices when demand arrives.
A market that expects supply to appear on time will tend to have different price increases than a market that expects supply to be scarce and unpredictable.
Then there is the legal framework. This became clear in 2025, but XRP could not be turned into a frictionless institutional asset overnight.
The SEC closed its case against Ripple in August 2025, leaving in place a $125 million fine and an injunction on institutional sales.
This removes one cloud and makes it important. But it also leaves a record where distribution and access will never fully go away, especially for buyers concerned about how their assets are treated across venues and jurisdictions.
Next, layer on the part that most retail traders don’t explicitly recognize: hedging.
ETF compositions do not arrive as pure, unhedged spot purchases.
Authorized participants and market makers hedge risk as they source inventory, manage timing, and arbitrage differences between venues and products.
This often means buying spot XRP while remaining neutral by shorting futures or PERP, or locking in the spread you are being paid to earn.
If the hedge is deep, what appears to be demand will be filled with synthetic selling, and the spot chart will not respond as expected by the reader.
In 2025, that hedging toolkit is closer to institutional desks.
CME announced that it will launch cash-settled XRP futures on May 19, 2025, pending regulatory approval.
This is important not as a headline, but as a bridge to the types of risk management that large companies already use with other assets.
On CoinGlass, it appears that XRP derivatives trading is already large enough to provide real hedging, with open interest at around $3.4 billion and 24-hour futures volume at around $2.56 billion.
This leaves plenty of room for ETF-related hedging to rely on spot demand, especially when the market is in a mood where people want to rent exposure rather than hold it outright.
The combination of venues is also important. This is because liquidity is not just about the number of copies printed, but also about where the marginal buyers and sellers actually meet.
Kaiko wrote in April 2025 that while XRP spot trading volume is heavily concentrated offshore, XRP’s share of spot trading volume on US exchanges has risen to its highest level since the wave of delistings associated with the SEC’s 2021 litigation period.
Offshore concentrations can provide raw liquidity, but they can also spread price discovery across fragmented pools, each with its own participant composition, fee schedule, and hedging behavior.
This makes it easier to absorb the flow within one wrapper without making the spot chart react like a billboard.
That broader context is also visible in simple chart history.
XRP closed at around $1.88 on January 1, 2026.
In 2025, it hit a high of about $3.55 on July 22nd and a low of about $1.80 on April 8th.
As a result, the drawdown from the July closing peak to early 2026 will be approximately 47%.
In a market that makes such back and forth trips over a period of months, buyers tend to take profits sooner, sellers tend to show up sooner, and liquidity can feel thick to the point where it doesn’t.
Spot trading volume over the past month has been below the 2025 daily average, and volatility has been high over the past 90 days.
It’s exactly the cocktail that makes prices volatile even when the news looks good.
Putting all this together, it seems paradoxical that prices have actually remained relatively flat.
A $1.14 billion wrapper, representing about 1% of circulating supply, can coexist with a flat or choppy chart if net creation is steady but not dominant.
This is especially true when supply expectations are fixed by a known escrow pace, when perp and futures hedging meets spot buying in real time, and when liquidity is spread across multiple venues rather than concentrated in deep onshore pools.
It’s also easy to see why the relationship between the XRP ETF’s growth and spot price will feel more closely tied, as is the case with Bitcoin.
We need to accelerate net creation beyond normal sales flow.
Some of the hedge layers need to be relaxed rather than built up, requiring a deeper and cleaner onshore liquidity base with fewer marginal demand frictions and detours.
In other words, the wrapper needs to stop being the new access point and become a relentless vacuum.
Until then, the $1 billion XRP ETF is still worth taking seriously, but only for reasons other than the quick thrill of a one-day price increase.
The rapper category has crossed the line from novel to habitual.
It says advisors and brokerage accounts now have an easy way to hold XRP without having to juggle wallets or venues.
He also said the infrastructure is already in place for a bigger move when the market mood becomes friendly and flows pick up.
The pipe exists.
Now they are moving water rather than forcing floods.
