XRPL hosts $2.3 billion in tokenized assets, but only 22 wallets hold RWA tokens and $1.49 billion is recorded for internal tracking rather than active trading.

92% of trades on XRPL’s DEX already pair through XRP, but daily volume sits between $4 million and $8 million—far too low to create meaningful token demand.

XRP reaching $10 requires XRPL to capture 3–5% of a multi-trillion-dollar tokenization market with XRP serving as the bridge asset, not just the fee token.

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Trillions of dollars in real-world assets are expected to move onto blockchains by 2030, and Ripple wants the XRP Ledger to be where a big chunk of that lands. XRPL already hosts $2.3 billion in tokenized value and has overtaken Solana and Polygon in total on-chain real-world assets. But XRP price is trading at $1.40—down 30% year-to-date—because most of that tokenized activity settles in stablecoins rather than XRP (CRYPTO: XRP).

That disconnect is the whole XRP price prediction debate right now. Tokenization on the ledger is growing faster than almost anyone expected, yet the token that powers it hasn't moved. Whether XRP can reach $10 depends on it becoming the liquidity layer that connects all those tokenized assets—or stays the fee token that costs a fraction of a cent to use.

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XRPL hosts roughly $2.3 billion in tokenized real-world assets as of early 2026, up from $991 million at the start of the year. It now ranks second in 30-day RWA growth behind only Arbitrum, and it's passed several larger networks in total on-chain tokenized value. Archax, a UK-regulated digital securities exchange, has committed to bringing $1 billion in tokenized assets onto the ledger by mid-2026. Ondo Finance, Guggenheim, and OpenEden have already placed around $300 million in the U.S. Treasury products on the XRP network.

Most of that $2.3 billion is concentrated in a handful of products. Justoken's JMWH—a tokenized energy asset backed by Latin American power companies—accounts for $861 million on its own. It has 12 holders and is only available outside the U.S. Ctrl Alt's tokenized diamond collections add another $189 million, and Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin holds $348 million on the XRPL side. Commodities and stablecoins together make up over $1.2 billion of the total.

SBI Holdings issued a $65 million tokenized bond in Japan, and Société Générale launched its MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin on XRPL—but the actual user base is razor thin. Only 22 wallets hold RWA tokens across the entire ledger. And $1.49 billion of the $2.3 billion sits in "represented" assets—on-chain records used for internal tracking, not tokens that trade on a secondary market. The numbers are growing fast, but most of what's on XRPL right now is institutional record-keeping, not an active market.

Transaction fees on XRPL cost roughly 0.00001 XRP per transaction—about 100,000 transactions for a single XRP. Total fee burns since the ledger launched in 2012 add up to around 14 million XRP, which is 0.014% of total supply. Even with daily payments hitting 2.7 million—a 12-month high—the fee channel isn't creating demand that moves the price. Billions in tokenized assets can sit on the ledger without burning more than a few hundred XRP per day.

Reserve requirements add a slightly bigger floor. Every XRPL account needs 1 XRP locked as a base reserve, plus 0.2 XRP for each object it owns—trust lines, offers, escrows. That XRP stays immobilized as long as the account exists. With the current holder count still in the low dozens, reserves barely register. But if tokenization brings millions of new accounts and trust lines over the next few years, locked XRP starts adding up. The catch is that reserves scale with user and object counts, not with the dollar value of what's tokenized—a billion dollars of assets can sit inside a handful of issuer accounts without locking much XRP at all.

XRPL's built-in DEX already runs 27,000 AMM pools, and 92% of trades on it go through XRP pairs, making XRP the default bridge between tokenized assets. If institutions start trading tokenized bonds, funds, and commodities on-chain, market makers would need to hold XRP as working capital to quote prices and fill orders. Ripple's Permissioned DEX—a KYC-gated order book that went live in February—is built for exactly that kind of institutional flow.

Daily DEX volume still runs between $4 million and $8 million, though, and total DeFi value locked on XRPL sits at just $47.5 million. The plumbing for XRP to become the liquidity layer of a tokenized marketplace is there—but the volume to justify it hasn't shown up yet.

Ethereum holds roughly $15.4 billion in tradeable tokenized assets—about 59% of the $25.9 billion sitting across all blockchains. It carries $55 billion in DeFi value locked, $164.6 billion in stablecoins, and a developer base that dwarfs every other chain. XRPL's $461 million in tradeable tokenized value is a fraction of that, and its $47.5 million in DeFi TVL barely registers next to what Ethereum has built.

Arbitrum is outpacing XRPL in recent RWA growth and inherits Ethereum's security while running cheaper transactions. Stellar targets the same cross-border settlement niche that Ripple built its brand on, and it already hosts CBDC pilots with multiple central banks. SWIFT itself is upgrading its own infrastructure to handle tokenized asset transfers, which could reduce the need for blockchain-based alternatives altogether. This shows that XRPL isn't the only option for institutions looking to tokenize.

Where XRPL stands out is compliance tooling built directly into the ledger. Authorized trust lines let issuers control exactly who can hold a token, and the Permissioned DEX creates KYC-gated trading environments that regulated firms can use without worrying about legal exposure. Transactions settle in 3 to 5 seconds for a fraction of a cent, and the ledger hasn't gone down once in over 13 years.

Ethereum doesn't offer anything close to that kind of built-in compliance—but it has the liquidity, the developers, and the DeFi depth that XRPL is still years away from matching.

At $10, XRP's market cap would sit around $610 billion with 61 billion tokens in circulation—roughly where Ethereum peaked in 2025. Getting there through tokenization means XRPL needs to host enough on-chain value, and enough trading activity through XRP pairs, to justify that valuation.

Tokenization Market by 2030

XRPL Share Needed

On-Chain Value

XRP Price Range

McKinsey base case ($2T)

5%

$100B

$5–$7 with moderate bridge demand

BCG/Ripple ($9.4T)

3–5%

$280B–$470B

$7–$12 if XRP serves as bridge asset

Ark Invest ($11T)

3%

$330B

$8–$10 with scaled DEX and AMM volume

A billion dollars in tokenized bonds can be recorded on XRPL without anyone ever needing to hold more than a few XRP for fees and reserves. The $10 case only works if those tokenized assets are actively traded on XRPL's DEX using XRP as the bridge currency—forcing market makers to carry XRP inventory and locking tokens in AMM pools. Right now, 92% of DEX trades already pair through XRP, so the routing exists, but daily volume is still under $8 million. Sustained liquidity demand at scale is what separates a $3 XRP from a $10 one.

Ripple's Permissioned DEX is the one thing to watch. If institutional trading volume in tokenized assets starts flowing through XRP-paired order books, and XRPL captures even a low-single-digit share of a multi-trillion-dollar tokenization market, a $10 XRP price is achievable. If institutions keep settling in stablecoins and treating XRP as nothing more than a fee token, the XRP price will likely remain closer to $3 or $4 than $10 by the end of the decade.

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