Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse dropped a monster number this week: the company cleared roughly $16 trillion in payments and prime brokerage volume over the past year. The twist? “Nearly none” of that massive flow ran through any digital asset.
That stat is blowing up in the XRP community because it’s both a flex and a challenge. Ripple is already slinging enormous value for institutions… but the crypto piece investors care about is still a tiny slice of the pie.
The Runway Argument That Raises More Questions
The bullish case is straightforward: if even a small chunk of those institutional flows flips to blockchain rails, the upside could be massive.
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The big unanswered question is timing & whether institutions will pick the XRP coin, stablecoins, or something else when they finally make the decisive jump.
Fresh data backs up the momentum story on the actual crypto side. Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) business hit roughly $1.2 billion in Q1 2026 — a solid 45% jump year-over-year.
That’s real, growing usage of XRP as a settlement tool, even if it’s still a fraction of the total volume Ripple handles.
Stablecoins On XRPL Are Closing In On $1 Billion
At the same time, stablecoins on the XRP Ledger are exploding. Total stablecoin market cap on XRPL recently hit around $948.6 million, up from just $376.9 million back in early January. Ripple’s own RLUSD is dominating with roughly $810.6 million of that total.
This is the double-edged sword: more stablecoin liquidity on XRPL is great for real usage and tighter spreads.. but it also raises the question of whether future payments will route mostly through stablecoins instead of XRP itself.
Ripple is proving it can move trillions at institutional scale. The next chapter is whether XRP graduates from a niche settlement asset to a bigger piece of that flow — or stays mostly on the sidelines while stablecoins eat the cash leg.
The infrastructure is already humming. Now it’s a race to see which asset actually captures the mainstream payments wave. Keep watching those ODL numbers and XRPL stablecoin growth: they’re the real-time scoreboard.
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