Why XRP Price Refuses to Rise Despite Ripple’s Mega Moves

This year, XRP price remains too low despite Ripple spending a whopping $4 billion on expanding its payments and digital asset ecosystem. Acquisitions and regulatory approvals in Singapore and the UAE have accelerated adoption. However, the market sentiment remains quite low. This has made investors wonder how XRP has failed to keep pace with the actual Ripple advancement.

Ripple Grows Globally Through Major Acquisitions

Ripple announced four significant acquisitions on December 4, designed to create an end-to-end payment and digital assets infrastructure: GTreasury ($1 billion), Rail ($200 million), Palisade and Ripple Prime. These acquisitions combined corporate treasury intelligence, stablecoin payments, high-speed custody, and institutional grade liquidity into the Ripple payment ecosystem.

Ripple President Monica Long stressed that the company is providing a single platform through which businesses can move, manage, and optimize money instantly. Its ambition is a full stack of payments that is supported by enterprise-ready digital asset services, which places the institutions with the means necessary to scale in the on-chain economy.

Regulatory wins have also strengthened Ripple with more credibility. The Monetary Authority of Singapore gave Ripple a widened Major Payment Institution license, which expanded regulated payment operations. In the UAE, the fiat-backed stablecoin by Ripple, RLUSD, was approved by the FSRA to be used by institutions, including collateral, lending, and prime brokerage. Such approvals represent confidence.

XRP Price Lags Despite Ripple Adoption Gains

Despite these strategic developments, XRP has not been performing well. Its price declined by 31% in the last two months, and social sentiment is characterized by extreme fear, based on Santiment. According to the CryptoQuant data, the network velocity increases, which reflects a high pace of trading and low amounts of long-term holding. This is further strained by short positions, especially on the side of Korean investors, with Upbit currently containing 6.18 billion XRP, the largest amount this year.

At the time of writing, XRP was trading at a price of $2.03, which is almost 4% down in 24 hours. Analysts recommend focusing on measures of adoption rather than on charts. Black Swan Capitalist observed that it can be much more useful to monitor who implements solutions by Ripple and how the infrastructure develops, rather than the price fluctuations in the short term. Ripple has outlined its 2026 roadmap, such as extended integration of acquired assets, more corporate treasury services, and increased institutional adoption that preconditions potential long-term value creation.

The XRP ETFs, with new inflows added by Vanguard, may offer a short-term reprieve on the selling side, and the continued growth of Ripple infrastructure around the globe may ultimately bring the price closer to its adoption levels.

Ripple CTO Highlights XRPL Transparency

Recently, Ripple CTO David Schwartz published complete operational statistics of his XRP Ledger Hub, making an internal node publicly accessible. The hub that has been operating more than a month on version 2.6.2 displayed peer counts, traffic load, latency, and disconnection measurements. Under capacity, Schwartz indicated that peer reservations would be switched on in event of an increase in demand.

Schwartz also wrote about programmability of the XRPL, where he warned that adding features only to generate revenue to the validators. He has stressed the need to apply financial primitives more broadly, and major changes must have established demand to be justified by engineering risk.