XRP still trades 62.5 percent below its 2018 peak as supply growth and muted fund demand hold the token back

What happened

A CoinDesk analysis published on Friday put a number on a fact XRP holders already know from their own statements: the token, the fifth largest digital asset by market value and the native asset of the XRP Ledger, is still trading far below the peak it set in the first days of 2018, in a market where most of its large peers passed their old highs long ago. XRP traded at about 1.33 dollars, down 62.5 percent from its early January 2018 peak of 3.55 dollars. A buyer at that peak is still underwater nearly nine years later. The token did briefly reclaim the old high once, reaching 3.66 dollars in July 2025, before falling back sharply.

The comparison set is what makes the lag stark. Bitcoin is up 314 percent from its December 2017 peak of 19,804 dollars. Dogecoin is up 322 percent from its January 2018 high. BNB is up about 2,800 percent over the same span. Ether is up 66 percent and zcash 38 percent from their respective early 2018 highs. Tron is also below its old peak, but only by about 4 percent. Solana did not exist in 2018, having launched in 2020. Bitcoin, ether and the rest have all pulled back hard from their 2025 peaks, yet they remain far above their 2017 levels. On the price measure alone, XRP's 2018 buyer is in a different market from the bitcoin buyer of the same week.

The first explanation the analysts cited is supply. XRP's circulating supply grew 63 percent, from 38.7 billion tokens in 2017 to 63.1 billion, while the token's total market value fell only about 3 percent over the same span, according to analytics firm Nansen data quoted by CoinDesk. Arithmetic does the rest: if roughly the same total value is divided among 63 percent more tokens, each token is worth materially less. Put the other way, the same circulating market capitalisation spread across today's supply would imply a price roughly 39 percent lower than the 2018 figure, in the framing offered by an analyst at institutional asset manager Tesseract Group. By the total value measure, XRP did recover. By the per token price, which is the measure every holder actually experiences, it did not.

The second explanation is demand, and the fund data is the clearest version of it. Listed exchange traded funds have become the main channel through which institutional money reaches crypto. Bitcoin and ether funds have drawn billions. XRP funds, by contrast, have taken in 1.80 billion dollars in total since their debut nearly a year ago, according to SoSoValue data cited in the analysis, a sum bitcoin funds can exceed in a single strong day. Trading activity points the same way. Nansen data shows XRP spot volume down 53.5 percent, perpetual futures volume down 44 percent and active addresses on the network down 10.7 percent. Weaker fund inflows, thinner trading and fewer active addresses are three separate gauges reading the same underlying condition.

The third and fourth explanations are structural. The payments company closely associated with the token has concentrated on cross border payments infrastructure, its own dollar stablecoin and trade finance products, rather than on the sectors that have drawn the largest capital flows in this cycle, such as decentralised finance, artificial intelligence tokens and memecoins, and the ledger has not built the decentralised finance role that gives holders of ether, Solana and HYPE a yield and activity narrative. And the long legal fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission hangs over the early part of the story: the regulator sued in December 2020 alleging about 1.3 billion dollars raised through unregistered securities sales, a federal judge ruled in 2023 that sales on public exchanges were not securities offerings while sales to institutional investors were, a 125 million dollar penalty followed in 2024, and the case finally ended in August 2025 when both sides dropped their appeals. Analysts quoted in the piece note that the token briefly traded above 3 dollars as the case closed, and has since fallen about 59 percent, against declines of 32 percent for bitcoin and 44 percent for ether, with its circulating market value down about 56 percent over that span.

Why it matters

XRP's lag is a useful corrective to the way this market usually tells its own history. The standard account is a rising tide: bitcoin makes a new high, capital rotates outward, and the large tokens of the previous cycle are carried to new highs of their own. XRP shows the tide has a leak. A fixed total value returning to an asset whose supply has grown by almost two thirds does not restore the earlier price, and no amount of market wide recovery changes that division. Holders comparing today's price with a 2018 purchase price are not waiting for the market to come back. On these numbers, the market, measured by total value, largely did come back, and the per token result still fell short because the denominator changed underneath them.

The demand figures matter for a forward looking reason. In the current market structure, listed funds are not a side channel. They are where pension scale and adviser allocated money enters, and they compound: deeper funds mean tighter spreads, more research coverage and more model portfolios willing to include the asset. XRP funds drawing 1.80 billion dollars in nearly a year, against single days above 1 billion dollars for bitcoin funds, describes an asset that has regulatory clarity, a decade of brand recognition and a large retail base, and still has not converted those assets into institutional allocation at the scale of its two larger peers. The activity data, spot volume down by more than half and active addresses down, suggests the shortfall is not only an institutional story. Usage and trading interest have thinned alongside it.

There is also context that cuts the other way, and the analysis included it. XRP is not the only laggard of its vintage. On price, six of the other nine assets in the January 2018 top ten are further below their levels of that week than a total value comparison would suggest, a reminder that most of the 2018 leaderboard has not restored its early holders either. And the supply story has a natural limit. The escrow schedule that releases new tokens into circulation is finite and measurable, which is why the analysts' forward test, described below, turns on whether relative weakness persists once the flow of new supply slows.

What to watch

Watch XRP priced in bitcoin, rather than in dollars. That ratio strips out market wide moves and shows the relative demand question directly. Continued underperformance against bitcoin while the rest of the market is flat would confirm that the lag is asset specific, not cyclical.

Watch the monthly net distribution of new tokens after escrow releases and re escrowing, alongside changes in fund holdings, the test proposed by the Tesseract analyst quoted by CoinDesk. If supply growth slows and XRP still loses ground against bitcoin, the explanation shifts from arithmetic to demand, which is the harder problem to fix.

Watch fund flows for a change of scale. A single month in which XRP funds take in a sum comparable to their entire first year total of 1.80 billion dollars would signal that institutional allocation has actually arrived. Anything near the current run rate confirms the present pattern instead.

And watch network activity for a turn in the gauges that fell furthest: spot volume, down 53.5 percent, and active addresses, down 10.7 percent. A payments strategy built around the ledger and its associated stablecoin either shows up in those numbers eventually, or the gap between the company's infrastructure progress and the token's market performance becomes the permanent story rather than a lag.