XRP (XRP 1.70%) might be down by 22% in the last 12 months, but there's plenty of reason to be hopeful for its performance in 2026.
I predict three things in particular for this coin next year. Investors probably shouldn't be expecting a run to the moon, but all three of my predictions are at least somewhat bullish, and I expect XRP's price to rise from where it is now as a result.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. There will be at least two more big institutional pilots
Ripple, the company that issues XRP, will almost certainly announce in 2026 at least two additional pilot programs with recognizable financial institutions or payment processors in 2026.
For example, Ripple has recently highlighted bank adoption tied to its payments stack, including a European bank partnership announcement in December 2025, and I'm predicting that more collaborations of that type are on the way but will be even bigger than before.
The reason this is bullish is that a successful pilot program can validate institutional workflows and assess operational feasibility in a way that later encourages both the piloting organization as well as its peers to adopt the chain as a piece of financial technology. But a hard question is whether these pilots will require meaningful balances and transfers held on the chain, or whether XRP will be mostly optional plumbing used solely for paying chain fees. It isn't possible to know the answer in advance, as different businesses will want to use the chain for different purposes.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
2. Pools of key on-chain assets will grow rapidly
My second prediction is that the value of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on the XRPL will grow sharply in 2026, with tokenized U.S. Treasuries leading the way. The chain's base of stablecoins will also see a lot of growth.
Today, there are $213 million in tokenized assets held on the XRPL for the purpose of distribution or trading, and $322 million in stablecoin value. At the start of 2025, there were just $5 million in tokenized assets. Until the December 2024 launch of RLUSD, Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin on the XRPL, there wasn't all that much in the way of stablecoin value either. Today, RLUSD alone has a market cap of more than $1.3 billion spread across a handful of different networks including the XRPL.
Treasuries will lead the next leg of on-chain asset growth because they're the financial system's favorite cash equivalent to use as collateral, and stablecoins will also grow because they make settlement and treasury operations easier across borders and across counterparties. Especially considering Wall Street's increasing interest in blockchain-based asset management over the last 18 months, a doubling or tripling of stablecoin and tokenized asset value on the network in 2026 is thus very plausible.
Of course, it's also possible that capital holders will ultimately prefer to park their assets on a competing blockchain.
3. One type of institutional buyer will ebb, but another type will boom
In 2026, I predict that the XRP digital asset treasury (DAT) company phenomenon will lose most of its remaining (and already quite diminished) momentum.
In case you missed it, a crypto treasury company, or DAT, is essentially a business that raises money (often via issuing stock or taking out debt) to accumulate a crypto asset. When the stock market loves the asset's story, inflows often surge, and the coin's price rises alongside the DAT stock prices. When sentiment sours, inflows can slow, stop, or become outflows. We've been in a more bearish period in crypto for the last few months, and so the gold rush of new treasurers emerging is almost certainly over.
Nonetheless, I also predict that the more durable buyer base in 2026 will be the new and expanding crop of XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs). With the first of these ETFs launching in late November, there's now a new and easy way for retirement or brokerage investors to accumulate XRP without needing to set up a compatible crypto wallet. Right now, after less than a month on the market, those ETFs now control around $1.2 billion in assets, making them among the most successful crypto ETF launches to date.
But there is some evidence that this success is happening unusually early, which might portend even larger inflows in the future. The first Ethereum ETFs brought very underwhelming inflows for its first nine months or so before starting to pick up speed.
So if the XRP ETFs follow this pattern, the tail end of 2026 will be when they start to bring in larger and larger volumes of capital, which will likely boost XRP's price.
