July 11, 2026

News Roundup

XRP trades near $1.08–$1.10 this week, holding a floor it has defended since bottoming around $1.04 in late June — down roughly 70% from its 2025 peak near $3.65. The headline tension for the week is a genuine contradiction in the on-chain data: two studies of the same network are telling opposite stories depending on which metric you pick.

The bullish read: tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger climbed from $4.0 billion to $4.4 billion in the past few days alone, extending a 12-month run from roughly $150 million — a nearly 30x increase that keeps XRPL ranked the 4th-largest tokenization network globally, ahead of Stellar. A U.S. supply-chain verification firm, Made In USA Inc., picked XRPL this week for product certification, a genuinely new use case outside payments and finance. ETFs have now logged eight consecutive weeks of net inflows. The bearish read, from the same week: daily active addresses on XRPL fell to 25,350, the second-lowest reading of 2026, and new wallet creation dropped to its lowest level since November 2024. ETF inflows have also throttled sharply, pulling in just $107,000 on July 10 versus much stronger flows earlier in the second quarter. Both data sets are accurate; they are simply measuring different things — institutional infrastructure use (RWA tokenization, ETF wrappers) is expanding while retail and organic on-chain activity is contracting. Large holders, who control roughly 68% of supply, appear to be the main force keeping price stable by moving coins into storage rather than selling.

On regulation, the CLARITY Act's July 4 signing target — floated by the White House as recently as June — has formally passed without a vote. The bill remains parked on the Senate calendar (Calendar No. 423), eligible for floor consideration whenever leadership schedules it, but talks over an ethics provision tied to the Trump family's crypto holdings and a law-enforcement carve-out remain unresolved. The Senate returns from recess July 13 with roughly three working weeks before the August recess. Estimates of 2026 passage odds now diverge meaningfully across sources: Galaxy Research has cut its estimate to 60% from 75% a few weeks ago, while Polymarket prices it closer to 48–59% depending on the day. Senator Lummis has warned that a miss before August pushes the next realistic window to 2030.

On the corporate side, Ripple's pace of announcements has not slowed. This week alone: full MiCA CASP authorization across the European Economic Area (upgraded from preliminary status, confirmed directly on Ripple's newsroom), a Japan RLUSD partnership with SBI Group, expanded Bitso coverage across Latin America, new RLUSD partnerships in Türkiye, and reported integration of XRP into Rakuten's ecosystem for over 44 million users in Japan. Separately, Ripple joined Open USD, a new dollar stablecoin backed by a consortium including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock — a notable move for a company that has spent years building its own RLUSD stablecoin in parallel.

The clearest bearish voice this week came from a credible, named source rather than an anonymous critic: Tom Zschach, SWIFT's former Chief Innovation Officer, publicly and bluntly denied rumors that SWIFT's newly launched blockchain ledger pilot (17 banks including HSBC, Citi, and UBS) involves any XRP integration, tweeting simply "Not happening." Zschach has a documented history of skepticism toward Ripple, previously comparing its technology to "a fax machine" in the internet era, and he pointed out that SWIFT's pilot centers on tokenized bank deposits — a fundamentally different architecture than a public token. His denial doesn't diminish XRPL's own momentum, but it does directly puncture a speculative narrative that had been circulating on social media and briefly influencing price action.

Forward-Look: What This Means

The core structural fact to hold onto is one Ripple's own CTO has acknowledged: RippleNet now counts over 300 bank and financial institution partners, but the large majority use RippleNet's messaging or RLUSD rather than XRP itself for settlement. That gap — infrastructure adoption without proportional token demand — is the honest throughline connecting this week's RWA growth, the address-count decline, and the muted price reaction to genuinely positive corporate news. It is not a new problem, but this week's data makes it more visible than usual, with institutional and retail activity moving in literally opposite directions on the same network in the same week.

The CLARITY Act remains the single most plausible catalyst to close that gap, because federal commodity-status clarity is the blocker most frequently cited by institutions still on the sidelines. But it is worth being precise about a real structural risk: even full Senate passage would not, by itself, generate XRP demand — it would remove a legal obstacle, and institutions would still need to choose XRP over RLUSD, other stablecoins, or off-chain settlement for their actual liquidity needs. The Zschach denial this week is a useful reminder that not every plausible-sounding integration story is real, and that XRP's case ultimately has to be won on its own settlement economics — sub-5-second finality, sub-cent fees — rather than on borrowed credibility from incumbents like SWIFT. Watch the Senate floor calendar over the next three weeks, but watch XRPL's own address and wallet-creation trend with equal weight; a legislative win that doesn't coincide with a recovery in organic network usage would be a genuinely mixed signal, not an unambiguous one.

XRP Radar Brief #101 [sixty sources reviewed / six research passes / one Ripple-official source checked directly] — compiled from public reporting, including a direct check of Ripple's official press releases page, for Red Rio Ventures / XRPRadar. Not financial advice.