Most of Ripple’s bank partners never touch XRP. Here is the real problem

The crucial fact is how Ripple’s partners split between these two. By most accounts, only around forty percent of Ripple’s roughly three hundred partners use On-Demand Liquidity, the XRP-based product, while the other sixty percent or so use the messaging and software rails that do not touch XRP at all. So when the community hears three hundred partners and pictures three hundred sources of XRP demand, the accurate picture is closer to a bit more than a hundred partners using the token-based product, and a larger group using Ripple software that bypasses XRP entirely. 

This is not hidden or scandalous; it simply reflects that many institutions wanted Ripple’s payments technology without taking on a volatile crypto asset. But it has enormous implications for the token, because it means the headline partner count overstates XRP demand by a wide margin. A bank can be a proud, public Ripple partner and contribute precisely nothing to XRP usage, and many are exactly that. The first step to understanding XRP’s stuck price is to stop counting all of Ripple’s partners as XRP customers, because most of them are not.

Even ODL partners do not hold XRP

It would be natural to assume that the forty percent of partners using On-Demand Liquidity are therefore buying and holding XRP, generating steady demand, but even that is largely not the case, and the reason cuts to the core of the value-accrual problem. The way ODL works, banks do not generally buy or hold XRP themselves. Instead, licensed exchanges and liquidity providers sit in the middle of the transaction. 

When a bank uses ODL to send value across a corridor, the source currency is converted into XRP, the XRP moves across the ledger in seconds, and it is converted into the destination currency on the other side, but this buying and selling is handled by market makers and exchanges, not by the bank. From the bank’s perspective, it puts fiat in on one side and receives fiat out on the other, never holding the token in between. The XRP is touched only momentarily, by the liquidity providers facilitating the swap, before it is converted back.

This structure is deliberate and is actually part of ODL’s appeal to institutions: it lets banks access the speed and capital efficiency of XRP-based settlement while staying in their regulatory comfort zone, seeing only fiat on their books and never holding a volatile crypto asset. For the banks, that is a feature. 

For XRP holders hoping that institutional adoption means institutions accumulating XRP, it is a disappointment, because it means even the token-using corner of Ripple’s business does not create the kind of sustained, buy-and-hold demand that would steadily lift the price. The demand ODL creates is real but fleeting: XRP is bought and sold in the same moment to bridge a payment, generating transactional throughput rather than lasting accumulation. 

The momentary buying does create some genuine buy pressure, which the bull case rightly emphasizes, but it is a different and weaker force than the image of banks adding XRP to their reserves. So the picture sharpens: most partners do not touch XRP, and most of those that do touch it only in passing, through intermediaries, without ever holding it.

The value-accrual problem this creates

Put these facts together and you arrive at the deepest issue in the entire XRP story, the one that explains the stuck price more convincingly than any other: the problem of how value accrues to the token. A blockchain network, or in this case a payments business built around a token, can grow impressively while the token itself fails to capture that growth, if the activity does not translate into sustained demand for the asset. 

That is precisely the situation the two-Ripples split creates. Ripple the company can keep signing partners, opening corridors, and processing more payments, and most of that growth flows through software that bypasses XRP or through an ODL process that touches XRP only momentarily via intermediaries. The corporate success is real, but the channel connecting it to token demand is far narrower than the partner count suggests.

This is the mechanical explanation for the puzzle that has frustrated XRP holders all year: Ripple keeps winning, and XRP keeps trading near a dollar beneath its major moving averages. The wins are concentrated in parts of the business that do not require holding the token, so they do not generate the buy-and-hold demand that would lift the price.

Layered on top is XRP’s large supply, including the enormous quantity Ripple holds in escrow and periodically releases, which means that even meaningful transactional demand must contend with substantial available supply. For demand to overwhelm that supply and move the price durably, the token would need usage on a scale that the current adoption pattern, heavy on XRP-free software and light on XRP accumulation, does not produce. 

None of this means XRP cannot rise; it means the path from Ripple’s business growth to XRP’s price is not the automatic, mechanical link the bullish narrative assumes. The token does not appreciate simply because Ripple succeeds. It would appreciate if usage of the specific XRP-based product grew large enough that the momentary demand it generates, compounded across enormous volume, finally outweighed the supply. That is a much higher bar than signing the three-hundredth partner.

The escrow overhang that makes it worse

There is a supply-side dimension to the value-accrual problem that deserves its own attention, because it raises the bar that token demand must clear. A very large quantity of XRP sits in escrow controlled by Ripple, released into the market on a schedule over time, and this steady stream of new available supply is a structural feature of the token that has no equivalent in a fixed-supply asset. Whatever demand the network generates, whether the momentary buying of On-Demand Liquidity or the buy-and-hold demand of ETFs, must contend not only with the XRP already circulating but with the additional supply that periodically enters from escrow. This is part of why even real demand has struggled to move the price durably: it is pushing against a supply that keeps replenishing.

The interaction between the demand pattern and the supply schedule is the crux. If the token-using share of Ripple’s business were large and growing fast, the transactional demand it generates might comfortably absorb the escrow releases and then some, letting the price rise. But because most of Ripple’s activity bypasses the token, and the part that uses it does so only momentarily through intermediaries, the demand side has been too thin to overwhelm the supply side decisively. The result is a token that can trade sideways even during periods of corporate success, because the modest, fleeting demand from settlement is roughly matched by available and incoming supply. 

Critics of Ripple have long pointed to the escrow releases as a persistent headwind, while the company argues the releases are managed responsibly and that it has an incentive not to suppress its own largest holding. Either way, the practical point for holders is that the value-accrual gap is not only about weak demand capture; it is about weak demand capture meeting a large and replenishing supply, which together explain why the price has been so resistant to the steady drumbeat of adoption headlines. For the token to break higher durably, demand would need to grow enough to clear both the circulating float and the escrow overhang at once, which is a higher bar than demand alone.

The bull case deserves a fair hearing

The picture so far is sobering, but the bullish rebuttal is substantive and deserves a fair hearing, because the situation is not as one-sided as the skeptical read alone implies. The first point in XRP’s favor is that the momentary demand ODL creates is still real demand. Every time the XRP-based product bridges a payment, XRP is genuinely bought, even if it is sold moments later, and at sufficient volume that continuous buying and selling represents real, ongoing market activity rather than nothing. 

If the corridors using ODL grow and the volume flowing through them scales up, the cumulative buy pressure from all that bridging could become a meaningful force, particularly because it recurs constantly instead of being a one-time event. The bull case holds that the token-touching share of Ripple’s business is the part that matters, and that as it grows, so does the demand that flows through XRP.

The second point is that the forty percent is not fixed. Partners that adopted Ripple’s messaging software first can later convert to On-Demand Liquidity, and Ripple has every incentive to push that conversion, since it is the largest holder of XRP and benefits directly when XRP usage rises. If a meaningful share of the messaging-only majority converts to the XRP-based product over time, the demand base expands substantially. 

The third and perhaps strongest point is that settlement throughput is not the only channel to XRP demand. The forces most capable of moving XRP, the institutional flows into spot ETFs and the regulatory clarity that the CLARITY Act would provide, operate largely independent of whether banks hold XRP in their settlement flows. ETF demand is buy-and-hold demand of exactly the kind ODL does not generate, and it has already drawn over a billion dollars into XRP funds. 

Tokenized real-world assets settling on the XRP Ledger represent another growing source of activity. So the bull case is that the partner-count critique, while accurate about settlement mechanics, misses the channels, ETFs and regulation, that could drive XRP regardless of how banks handle their payment corridors. These are genuine counterpoints, and an honest holder should weigh them against the structural concern instead of dismissing either.

The geographic reality nobody mentions

A further dimension that rarely makes it into the bull-or-bear debate is where Ripple’s XRP-based volume actually flows, and it complicates the global-rail narrative in an important way. On-Demand Liquidity has been live in production for years, but its real usage has been concentrated in specific cross-border corridors instead of spread evenly across global finance. 

The meaningful volume has historically clustered in particular regions, such as certain Middle East and Southeast Asia corridors, and more recently in Latin American routes involving institutions like Braza Bank and Mexican corridors involving Bitso. These are real flows with real value, and the busiest names on the XRP Ledger include identifiable financial institutions instead of anonymous wallets, which is a genuine point in the network’s favor. But the volume is geographically concentrated, not the worldwide banking rail the headline narrative implies.

This concentration matters for two reasons. First, it means XRP’s settlement demand depends heavily on a relatively small set of corridors, so the token’s utility-driven demand is less diversified and more exposed to the fortunes of those specific routes than a global-rail framing would suggest. Second, in the corridors where institutional settlement does happen on-chain, XRP increasingly competes for share against alternatives, including dollar stablecoins like USDC and Ripple’s own RLUSD, as well as emerging central-bank digital-currency projects, according to blockchain-analytics observations.