Q4 2024 XRP Markets Report

For over a decade, Ripple has been leading the charge on crypto innovation, building solutions leveraging XRP and the XRP Ledger, and providing crypto infrastructure for financial institutions. Ripple publishes the quarterly XRP Markets Report, sharing insights on the state of crypto markets and updates on the XRP ecosystem. As an XRP holder, Ripple values open communication and trust, driving global adoption and building utility for crypto.

Key Highlights

• After years of market manipulation by the SEC, XRP, once the second most valuable digital asset, rebounded as the regulatory overhang eased, surging by 280% in Q4.

• President Trump’s executive order marked a monumental shift, paving the way for innovation and tremendous growth in the U.S. by calling for regulatory clarity through comprehensive legislation and fair banking access for legal crypto businesses.

• The demand for XRP products continued on its positive trajectory as WisdomTree and Coinshares filed an S-1 for a spot XRP ETF joining three other ETF issuers, including Bitwise, Canary Capital, and 21 Shares.
  
  

Crypto Markets Summary

The final quarter of 2024 marked a turning point for the crypto market, sparking optimism for a new era of growth for the industry, specifically in the U.S. Following President Donald Trump’s victory, markets focused on how the Federal Reserve would navigate interest rate cuts, wary of triggering inflation. The Fed’s cautious approach contributed to a stable environment, which coincided with a broad rally across global assets, including cryptocurrencies.

Amid this rally, XRP stood out with a 280% surge during Q4. This rise reflected more than just market dynamics—it was a recovery years in the making. Ripple and the broader XRP ecosystem had been stifled by the SEC’s actions, which artificially manipulated the market, dampened trader confidence, and held back growth. Seven years ago, before the SEC anointed ETH and attacked XRP and Ripple, XRP was the second most valuable digital asset. With regulatory overhang easing, XRP found itself in a new position of strength. 

XRP’s rally was driven by strong demand on major exchanges, with Binance leading the way (36% of spot volume), followed by Upbit Korea (20%) and Coinbase (9%). Following Trump’s election victory, spot trading volumes across all exchanges surged significantly, averaging $5 billion daily from mid-November through December—up from $500 million the previous month. December 2 marked a record-breaking day, with nearly $25 billion in spot volume traded across CCData’s Top Tier exchanges. Notably, Coinbase doubled its share of total XRP trading volume, underscoring U.S. enthusiasm and demand for crypto.

The majority of activity in XRP markets centered on spot trading rather than short-term speculative bets, a sign that buyers were buying to hold, reflecting confidence in XRP’s long-term potential based on many external market dynamics. Institutional demand for XRP products continued to increase as WisdomTree and Coinshares filed an S-1 for a spot XRP joining three other ETF issuers, including Bitwise, Canary Capital, and 21 Shares.

With the new U.S. administration at the helm and continued strong institutional interest, the crypto industry is poised for a period of unprecedented growth and innovation.

SEC Lawsuit 
On January 15, the SEC filed its opening brief in its appeal. As expected, the SEC’s appeal was a rehash of arguments that have already failed in court. Notably, Ripple had requested the SEC to postpone the filing of their opening brief considering the forthcoming leadership changes, but the SEC refused. In terms of next steps, Ripple will formally respond to this brief by April 16 and looks forward to working with new SEC leadership.

It’s important to note that the appeal does not question whether XRP itself is a security. To understand more about what the SEC is (and more importantly, isn’t) appealing, please refer to this fact sheet. 

A New Era of Pro-Innovation Regulation in the U.S.
For the first time, the U.S. has a pro-crypto President in the White House and a pro-crypto Congress, both committed to advancing policies that support the crypto industry. Within his first week in office, President Trump’s administration signaled its dedication to revitalizing and fostering crypto innovation in the U.S. 

President Trump signed an executive order, pronouncing the important role crypto, blockchain and digital financial technology all play in the U.S. economy. The executive order underscores a monumental shift in the U.S.’ approach to crypto: a call for regulatory clarity through comprehensive legislation, support for private stablecoin innovation backed by U.S. Treasuries, and ensuring open and fair access to banking services for legal businesses. The EO also calls for the establishment of a Working Group on digital asset markets - further highlighting that establishing regulatory clarity for the digital asset industry is a top priority for this administration. Finally, the EO includes a call for recommendations on the development of a U.S. digital asset stockpile.

Also within the same week, the SEC took a significant step of rescinding SAB 121 – a policy widely criticized as harmful guidance that discouraged banks from partnering with crypto companies. The GAO had determined that SAB 121 violated the rulemaking process, making its removal a positive and critical move for the industry. 

Lastly, Gary Gensler resigned as SEC Chair, replaced with Acting SEC Chairman Uyeda who has publicly claimed that the SEC's war on crypto created "confusion about what is legal” and “an environment hostile to innovation and conducive to fraud." More broadly, President Trump has already driven innovation and boosted job growth across the U.S. by appointing visionary leaders such as Scott Bessent, David Sacks, Paul Atkins, and others to key positions.

This renewed focus on collaboration and innovation will position the U.S. to play a leading role in ensuring that crypto becomes an integral part of the global financial infrastructure.

Global Regulatory Developments
In Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework officially came into effect, providing a comprehensive regulatory structure for crypto activities across EU member states. Meanwhile, the UK unveiled a detailed roadmap for crypto regulation, signaling a commitment to fostering innovation, while maintaining robust consumer protections.

In the Asia-Pacific region, competition to become the region's crypto hub has intensified. Hong Kong accelerated its licensing process for virtual asset service providers (VASPs), positioning itself as a global leader, alongside Singapore. South Korea is also reevaluating its approach to crypto, reconsidering its ban on crypto ETFs amid surging investor demand. 

Finally, the Abu Dhabi Global Market’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) introduced a groundbreaking framework for fiat-referenced tokens, like stablecoins. Notably, this framework includes provisions for issuing yield-bearing stablecoins, a move that could redefine the role of stablecoins in traditional and decentralized finance.

Deep Dive: XRP Markets 
For this report, Ripple uses market metrics from public sources including CCData, Bloomberg, and Refinitiv Eikon.

Taking a look at XRP markets in Q4, XRP volumes were elevated as average daily volumes (ADV) were at $3.4 billion on top-tier exchanges. The XRP/BTC ratio increased 130% over Q4. This is particularly significant during a time when Bitcoin reached its – at that time – all-time high of around $108,000.

Chart 1: 
XRP realized volatility mostly declined during the first half of Q4 2024, touching 40% in early November. Volatility picked up after the U.S. presidential election, continuously increasing to year-highs of around 200% before a correction to 160% at year’s end. By November-end, XRP price also reached its high water mark for the year at around $2.70, an increase of more than 500% from early November. 

Table 1: Major Tokens Price and Volume (End of Q4‘24 figures)
USD prices and average trading volume reflects daily trading activity for the USD and stablecoin pairs on top tier exchanges as measured by CCData.

Chart 2: XRP Spot Exchange Volume
In early Q4, daily trading volumes held steady at approximately $1 billion but dropped to around $500 million throughout October and into mid-November. However, following Trump’s election win, spot trading volumes across all exchanges saw a substantial increase, averaging $5 billion daily from mid-November through December. This period culminated in a record-setting day on December 2, with nearly $25 billion in spot volume traded across CCData’s Top Tier exchanges.

Chart 3:  XRP Spot Exchange Volume (%)
XRP volume distribution across exchanges remained relatively constant throughout the fourth quarter. After the U.S. election, U.S. exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken managed to get more shares from Bybit or Crypto.com. Nevertheless, Binance, Bybit and Upbit accounted for over 60% of the total traded volume.

Chart 4: Spot Traded Volume
The percentage of USD and USD stablecoin volume traded through fiat pairs increased from 14% in Q3 to 25% in Q4. The majority of XRP trading activity continues to be against USDT.

The State of the XRP Ledger (XRPL)

Ripple USD
RLUSD is available on leading global exchanges, market makers and payment providers including Uphold, Bitstamp, Bullish, Bitso, MoonPay, Independent Reserve, Mercado Bitcoin, CoinMENA and more.

The stablecoin market is over $220B and growing — and what’s going to continue to drive the next wave of adoption is utility. RLUSD can enable instant settlement for cross-border payments, integrate seamlessly with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and provide collateralization for trading real-world assets like commodities, securities, and treasuries on-chain. 

Notably, Ripple will use RLUSD to facilitate global payments on behalf of its enterprise customers. Ripple Payments has served $70 billion in payments volume and counting, and has near-global coverage with 90+ payout markets, which represent more than 90% coverage of the daily FX markets. 

Ripple is committed to full transparency of the reserves supporting RLUSD, providing monthly reserve reports conducted by an independent licensed third-party accounting firm. 

Tokenization of Real World Assets (RWAs)
The industry continued to witness a groundswell of interest from institutions embracing real-world asset tokenization. Archax, the first FCA regulated digital asset exchange, broker and custodian, announced its partnership with abrdn, one of the UK’s largest asset managers, to provide access to a money market fund tokenized on the XRP Ledger. In addition, Societe Generale-FORGE (SG-FORGE) announced its intention to deploy its MiCA-compliant stablecoin EURCV on the XRP Ledger to increase adoption and drive utility around use cases like payments. 

As more institutions explore asset tokenization, the XRP Ledger has become the blockchain of choice for RWA tokenization given its purpose-built design for fast, cost-effective, and scalable transactions. With 3-5 second settlement times, negligible fees, 1,500+ TPS, and built-in compliance tools, the XRPL has attracted a growing list of partners and innovators to tokenize their assets.

Institutional DeFi on the XRPL
Last quarter, Ripple along with the community continued to build on the XRP Ledger, expanding its capabilities to support the next wave of institutional DeFi innovation and projects. 

The XLS-40 amendment, introducing Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to the XRP Ledger, went live on mainnet, enabling users to manage self-sovereign, verifiable digital identities in line with W3C standards. In addition, XRPL’s new native oracle protocol went live and is now integrated with Band Protocol and DIA, providing secure, real-time data. In turn, these oracles will support pricing for various needs, including the upcoming lending protocol (XLS-66d), the XRPL AMM (XLS-30), tokenized financial assets, and more. The multi purpose token standard received a clean audit from Softstack. MPTs enable the creation of more advanced tokens that can represent different types of assets and rights by metadata. These tokens are highly flexible driving tokenization for complex use cases.

XRPL Amendments and Process
There is a community of developers, validators, universities, and companies that maintain, improve, and build on the XRPL. New features or changes to the blockchain go through a rigorous amendment process which requires agreement from at least 80% of validators for two weeks. This ensures the security and reliability of the blockchain while adding new capabilities. More than 100 validator nodes are active on the network, operated by universities, exchanges, businesses, and individuals. Ripple operates only one validator on the network.

Last quarter, the reserve requirements for using the XRP Ledger changed by the collective voting of the validators. The new requirements are 1 XRP base reserve per account (down from 10 XRP), and 0.2 XRP owner reserve increment per item (down from 2 XRP). The base cost of sending a transaction (10 drops) remains unchanged.

XRPL On-Chain Activity
The XRPL experienced heightened activity across key on-chain metrics despite a slight 2.86% drop in transaction count to 167 million. The AMM feature, launched in last March, achieved $774.15M in swap volume Q4, a significant increase from $31.23M in Q3. This growth drove on-chain DEX trading volume from $63.4M in Q3 to $1B in Q4 with AMM swaps accounting for 77% of total volume. The momentum was primarily driven by XRP’s price surge and strong adoption of First Ledger, a meme token creation and trading platform integrated with Discord. 

Wallet creation soared to 709K, a substantial jump from 140K in Q3, reflecting growing interest in the XRP Ledger. XRP's average closing price rose from $0.55 in Q3 to $1.43, peaking at $2.80, which increased network fees, with total XRP burned rising from 592K in Q3 to 724K in Q4. 

Trustlines grew from 7.3M to 7.9M in Q4, indicating growth in adoption of issued tokens on-chain. Of the 600K new trustlines established during the quarter, 37K were attributed to Ripple-issued RLUSD, highlighting its adoption and contribution to the token ecosystem's expansion.

Note: Ripple has updated its data sources for on-chain metrics in previous Markets Reports, which may result in slight discrepancies in reported figures.

Ripple’s XRP Holdings 
Ripple reports information about its XRP holdings at the beginning of the quarter and last day of the quarter. Its holdings fall into two categories: XRP that it currently has available in its wallets, and XRP that is subject to on-ledger escrow lockups that will be released each month over the next 42 months. 

For this latter category, Ripple does not have access to that XRP until the escrow releases it to Ripple on a monthly basis. The remaining XRP released is put back into the escrow each month. 

Note: From time to time, Ripple supports or transfers to third parties, such as ETPs, trusts, and other investments, XRP that Ripple reasonably expects to maintain in its holdings. When doing so, a reduced amount of XRP may be returned to escrow that month. Until and unless Ripple expects such XRP to enter the broader market (through, for example, further transfers to third parties), that XRP is included in “XRP Held by Ripple.”

September 30, 2024
Total XRP Held by Ripple: 4,436,713,796
Total XRP Subject to On-Ledger Escrow: 38,900,000,005

December 31, 2024
Total XRP Held by Ripple: 4,485,366,320 
Total XRP Subject to On-Ledger Escrow: 38,030,000,005