Ripple’s XRP is trading near $1.42, up 0.56% over 24 hours, after a month that delivered its best August performance since 2021. The token rallied 28.5% in August, touching $1.70 on August 28 before settling back into a range with support near $1.30 and resistance between $1.50 and $1.60.
Much of the bullish pressure is institutional. Spot XRP ETFs pulled in $153.55 million in August, with $150.28 million arriving in the final two weeks alone, bringing cumulative net inflows to $1.68 billion since launch and total net assets to $1.48 billion. On September 4, XRP ETFs recorded zero daily net inflows, though assets held steady. Goldman Sachs held about $87.4 million in XRP ETF exposure. On-chain data showed record XRP Ledger activity, with active addresses reaching 2.26 million in August, more than double July’s 1.02 million, and a 7-day average of daily active addresses hitting a new all-time high at 1.34 million.
The monthly escrow release of 1 billion XRP on September 1, worth about $1.38 billion, was absorbed without major volatility. XRP traded at $1.38 when the unlocks hit and sat near $1.42 five days later. Ripple’s remaining escrow balance now stands at 31.28 billion tokens. XRP Ledger payment volume spiked 521% in a single week in late August, reaching roughly 488.4 million XRP per day, while individual transaction counts fell 10.5% — a pattern consistent with large institutional or enterprise transfers. Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD also crossed $2.32 billion in market cap.
Regulatory and network catalysts remain central to the outlook. The September 15 CLARITY Act procedural vote could deliver commodity treatment for XRP, though the Senate delayed the act again before recess and returns September 14, with a Federal Reserve meeting scheduled for September 15–16. Nasdaq Rule 5711(d) already recognizes XRP among commodity-based digital assets alongside Bitcoin and Ether. Ripple is targeting cross-border payment corridors handling trillions of dollars, while SWIFT processes about $400 billion in daily cross-border payments and global stablecoin transaction volume has reached roughly $33 trillion. The proposed XRPL 3.3.0 Confidential Transfers upgrade requires support from at least 80% of trusted validators and could conceal token balances and transfer amounts while targeting institutional Multi-Purpose Tokens. XRPL already holds more than $530 million in tokenized real-world assets.
Claude AI’s bull-run scenarios for XRP range from $2.00–$2.20 in a conservative case, through $3.50–$4.50 in a moderate case, to $6.00–$8.00+ if regulation, ETF inflows, Confidential Transfers activation, SWIFT-Ripple settlement pilots, and a broad altcoin bull market align. Based on a circulating supply of about 59.4 billion XRP, those targets imply market capitalizations of roughly $119 billion, $267 billion, and $475 billion respectively. Analyst Celal Kucuker noted that multiple technical formations point toward $2.30 if XRP reclaims $1.50, describing the chart as “amazing” and suggesting the target could come sooner than expected.
