Between July 2025 and July 2026, XRP fell roughly 70 percent, from a peak of $3.66 to roughly $1.08. Over the same twelve months, institutional investors marked Ripple, the company most closely associated with that token, from a $40 billion valuation to $50 billion. The two moved in opposite directions, and the pattern was not confined to Ripple. Across the industry, the past eighteen months delivered nearly everything advocates had spent a decade asking for: the first federal stablecoin law, the end of the SEC’s long-running case against Ripple, spot ETFs beyond bitcoin and ether, and the beginning of bank charters for crypto firms from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Through all of it, most token prices fell.
