XRP ETFs Are Booming, But This Quiet $15 Billion Payment Layer Matters More Than Price

Forget the ticker tape—the real story isn't on the exchange.

While everyone's watching XRP ETFs grab headlines and speculators chase the next green candle, a far more significant shift is happening in the background. It's not about price discovery; it's about plumbing. A $15 billion payment infrastructure is being built, and it's poised to cut through the traditional financial system like a hot knife through butter.

The Engine Under the Hood

This isn't your granddad's settlement layer. We're talking about a network designed to move value across borders in seconds, not days—bypassing the correspondent banking maze that adds cost, friction, and enough middlemen to fill a stadium. The tech bypasses the old guard entirely.

Why the Fuss Over Infrastructure?

Because ETFs are just a wrapper—a fancy, regulated bet on an asset's price. The underlying payment layer? That's the bet on utility. It's the bet that institutions will eventually care more about what an asset *does* than what it *trades for*. It moves real money for real businesses, making the daily volatility charts look like noise.

A Quiet Revolution

This development flies under the radar precisely because it's useful. It doesn't need hype; it just needs to work. It's the unsexy, mission-critical software that banks and payment processors will eventually rely on, perhaps without ever mentioning the asset that powers it. They'll just enjoy the cheaper, faster settlements—the ultimate form of adoption.

So, let the ETF traders have their fun. The real money—the quiet, institutional, fee-generating money—is being made building the rails. After all, in finance, you either own the casino, lay the track, or you're just another passenger hoping your ticket pays off.

Payments and corridor reality in 2025

RippleNet now counts more than 300 financial institutions across 55-plus countries, with roughly 40% actively using XRP for On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) rather than just messaging rails.

ODL processed more than $15 billion of cross-border payments in 2024, a 32% year-over-year increase, with Asia-Pacific accounting for roughly 56% of volume.

ODL now spans more than 70 corridor pairs and covers an estimated 80% of major global remittance corridors. DAS Research puts ODL volume at about $1.3 billion just in the second quarter of 2025 alone, framed as part of Ripple's push to make XRP a Core payments infrastructure.

RippleNet as a whole, including corridors that do not yet settle in XRP, is processing more than $15 billion in cross-border transaction volume per month as of 2025.

That distinction matters: many institutions use RippleNet messaging and fiat-only settlement. XRP only appears where pre-funding costs and FX spreads justify taking token volatility risk. The relevant metrics are ODL volume, corridor coverage, and the share of partners routing traffic through XRP, not the total RippleNet client count.

Global cross-border payment volumes range from $130 trillion to $150 trillion annually, according to SWIFT-linked estimates.

Even $30 billion in annual ODL volume is meaningful for XRP but marginal for global payments. Real adoption on this axis WOULD look like ODL volumes compounding from the current $15 billion and the baseline, more than half of RippleNet clients opting into XRP, and corridor expansion beyond the APAC remittance niches that dominate today.

On-chain activity beyond speculation

XRPL handled roughly 1.8 million transactions per day in the third quarter of 2025, up about 9% quarter-on-quarter from 1.6 million in the previous quarter, with typical finality in 3 to 5 seconds.

Average daily active sender addresses reached about 25,300, with 447,200 new addresses created in the quarter, bringing total addresses to roughly 6.9 million. Weekly payment counts are up roughly 430% versus 2023 levels. Payments remain the dominant use case.

“Payment” transactions accounted for about 55.7% of total activity in the third quarter of 2025, with daily payment counts around 989,600.

The RWA angle adds weight. XRPL's tokenized real-world asset market cap hit $347 million at the end of the third quarter, up 193% quarter-on-quarter, according to rwa.xyz data. The movement was driven by US Treasury funds like Ondo's OUSG, commercial paper, and real-estate tokens.

Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin launched in December 2024 on XRPL and Ethereum, and its total supply sits at $1.3 billion as of Dec. 19. Within XRPL specifically, RLUSD had a market cap of roughly $293 million, up by 41% in the past 30 days.

Ripple is now piloting RLUSD on L2s like Optimism and Base via Wormhole's NTT standard.

RLUSD is already a billion-plus-dollar asset with a material but still minority presence on XRPL, and XRPL's RWA footprint is now hundreds of millions rather than hobby-scale. Still, it remains tiny versus USDT and USDC on ethereum and Solana.

Durable on-chain adoption means three things at once: payment transactions remaining the dominant type and growing in absolute terms, RWA capitalization and RLUSD usage on XRPL growing rather than migrating to Ethereum, and active addresses and new wallets expanding rather than spiking around price action and retracing.

Liquidity structure and institutional plumbing

Kaiko's crypto asset ranking for the third quarter places XRP tied with Ethereum in second place, with an AA score of 95 out of 100, earning full marks for liquidity, market depth, exchange availability, institutional adoption, and derivatives maturity, on par with Bitcoin.

XRP's average daily trading volume was around $1.73 billion in early 2025, a roughly 22% year-over-year increase. XRP is treated by market makers more like a top-tier asset than a fringe alt, regardless of ETF headlines.

At the DEX and AMM layer on XRPL, average daily CLOB volume for fungible issued currencies was about $7.9 million in the third quarter, with around 1 million CLOB trades and roughly 7,800 daily CLOB traders. Additionally, average daily AMM volume was about $1.7 million.

Those numbers are small versus centralized venues but illustrate fragmented liquidity: DEEP off-chain order books and perps versus fairly modest on-ledger liquidity, even as the network becomes more composable with AMMs, oracles, and upcoming smart-contract extensions.

Adoption test

Assume ETF AUM stabilizes around $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. What would have to MOVE over the next 12 to 24 months to call XRP's demand “durable” rather than ETF-driven?

First, ODL volumes and corridor coverage would need to keep growing from the $15 billion registered in 2024, and from the 70-plus corridor pairs.

That means total annual ODL volume stepping into the tens of billions and staying there, more than half of RippleNet clients opting into XRP rather than fiat-only rails, and corridor expansion with disclosed volumes rather than pilot language.

Second, XRPL's on-chain payments base of roughly 1.8 million daily transactions, 6.9 million addresses, and the majority of payment activity would need to continue rising rather than plateau.

A durable story has those curves sloping up even if price and ETF flows are flat: more payment transactions, more active addresses, more RWA issuance, and RLUSD volume on XRPL specifically, not just on Ethereum.

Third, liquidity quality would need to hold up. Kaiko's AA, 95/100 profile already has XRP's depth and derivative structure on par with Ethereum. The test in a stagnation scenario is whether order-book depth, bid-ask spreads, and open interest stay robust when ETF net flows normalize.

If they do, it suggests a base of market-maker and corridor-driven demand that isn't chasing ETF narratives.

Fourth, RLUSD and tokenized assets on XRPL would need to grow from a few hundred million in RWA market cap and about $88.8 million of RLUSD on XRPL into genuinely system-level collateral, rather than remaining a sidecar to the much larger Ethereum DeFi stack.

If those four things happen while ETF AUM is flat, XRP adoption is real: ETF products are just another access channel into an asset whose demand is anchored in cross-border flows, stablecoin rails, tokenized treasuries, and deep liquidity.

If ODL volumes stall, payment and address metrics roll over, RWA and RLUSD growth shift off-ledger, and liquidity scores slip once ETF inflows cool, the honest conclusion is that the 2025-26 XRP trade was mostly about ETFs, not structural demand. The plumbing will decide.