XRP Price Forecast - XRP-USD Around $2 As Trust Bank Charter And ETF Flows Reset The Risk/Reward

XRP Price Forecast - XRP-USD At $2: Sideways Tape Hides a Loaded Setup

Range-Bound Week: XRP-USD Holds $2.00 Amid Heavy News Flow

XRP-USD spent December 8–14 pinned around the $2.00 mark, trading roughly between $2.00 and $2.11 and closing the week near $2.00–$2.02, down about 1% over seven days and roughly 40–45% below the mid-July all-time high at $3.65. Market cap sits around $120–122 billion, with 24-hour spot volume near $1.3 billion, enough liquidity to move but not enough to force a trend. The tape is flat, but the context is not: regulatory wins, ETF inflows close to $1 billion, a new banking charter, cross-chain liquidity, and stablecoin expansion all landed while price refused to pick a direction.

Regulatory Breakthrough: Ripple’s U.S. Trust Bank Charter And RLUSD Scale

Ripple secured conditional approval for a U.S. national trust bank charter, giving it the green light to operate Ripple National Trust Bank under federal oversight. The vehicle lets Ripple custody digital assets and directly manage reserves for its dollar stablecoin RLUSD, which already holds about $1.3 billion in backing assets and is growing alongside the broader stablecoin market. The structure puts RLUSD under both federal and state scrutiny and removes a key institutional objection: custody and reserve management handled outside a bank-grade framework. This is a direct reputational and operational upgrade for the XRP ecosystem, even if the spot price ignored it in the short term.

ETF Infrastructure: TOXR Launch And Nearly $1 Billion In XRP Vehicles

On the listed-product side, the structural story is quietly powerful. A U.S.-listed XRP ETF under the ticker TOXR launched with a seed of roughly 100 million XRP—around $200–230 million at current prices—and an expense ratio in the 0.30% area, tracking a regulated XRP-USD reference rate. That comes on top of earlier spot XRP products from other issuers that have already attracted close to $1 billion in combined assets, with cumulative inflows near $950–970 million since launch. Despite XRP-USD trading around $2.00, capital is still flowing into wrapped exposure through brokerage accounts and ETP channels, signalling that medium-term allocators are willing to accumulate into weakness rather than chase strength.

Institutional Capital: Ripple’s $40B Valuation And Strategic Backers

The equity layer behind XRP is also re-rating. Ripple raised roughly $500 million at a valuation around $40 billion from heavyweight Wall Street and hedge fund investors including Fortress Investment Group, Citadel Securities and several large crypto-focused funds. That capital is not speculative retail money; it is structured to fund expansion of payments rails, bank partnerships, and the RLUSD stablecoin footprint. The funding round confirms that large institutions are still willing to put balance sheet capital behind Ripple’s business model even while XRP-USD trades 40% below its July peak.

Cross-Chain Liquidity: Wrapped XRP (wXRP), DeFi Access And RLUSD Expansion

Cross-chain infrastructure for XRP moved up a gear. A regulated custodian launched wrapped XRP (wXRP), issued 1:1 against native XRP held in institutional custody, with over $100 million of initial liquidity and support on Solana, Ethereum, Optimism and an EVM sidechain. wXRP is designed to trade against RLUSD and other assets across DeFi venues, turning XRP from being mainly a payments-rail asset into something that can plug into yield, lending and derivatives on multiple chains. In parallel, RLUSD continues to win regulatory approvals, including in Middle East jurisdictions, positioning it as a compliant settlement asset that can sit alongside XRP-USD in institutional workflows.

Macro Headwind: Fed Cut, Risk-Off Spasms And Crypto De-Risking

The macro tape is the main reason all of this hasn’t repriced XRP-USD higher. A recent Federal Reserve rate cut did not trigger a “buy everything” wave; crypto and risk assets sold off instead as investors focused on growth worries and policy uncertainty. Bitcoin is stuck around the high-$80k to $90k region with declining realized volatility, and majors like ETH are soft. That risk-off mode bleeds directly into altcoins: XRP-USD slipped around 1–2% on the day of the decision and has since traded like an asset pinned under macro positioning rather than reacting to its own news. In this environment, even positive ETF launches and regulatory wins mainly slow the downside rather than power a breakout.

Structural Disconnect: Network Momentum vs Token Price

Fundamentally, Ripple’s payments rails, RLUSD circulation and regulatory footprint are moving in one direction—up—while XRP-USD has underperformed both Bitcoin and Ethereum in recent months. Ripple has processed over $90–95 billion in payment volume and secured licenses or approvals in roughly 75 jurisdictions, but the token is flatlining around $2.00 with year-to-date drawdowns from the $3.65 high. That divergence raises the core question every serious holder must answer: how efficiently does XRP capture the value of Ripple’s growth? The banking charter, stablecoin scale and wXRP launch increase the surface area where value can bleed into or away from the token depending on fee design, spreads and treasury policy.

Daily Chart: $2.00–$2.04 Is The Balance Point, $1.98–$2.00 Is The Floor

On the daily timeframe, XRP-USD is boxed between a reaction low near $1.83 and a local high around $2.58, with current price hovering just above $2.00. The $2.00 handle is both a psychological pivot and a structural support zone clustered around $1.98–$2.04. Price sits beneath key moving averages: the fast 10-period EMA near $2.04 and the long 200-day SMA up around $2.60, with the 50- and 100-day averages also overhead. That slope configuration is textbook: medium-term trend still points down even as spot clings to support. Oscillators confirm indecision: daily RSI grinding under 50, CCI pressing around −100, ADX around the high-teens, and MACD marginally below its signal line. Trend strength is weak; direction is unresolved.