In XRP news from Swell 2026 — Ripple's annual institutional conference — Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse told the New York audience on Wednesday, October 28, that the company “will never give up on XRP,” addressing holders who fear that Ripple's business and the token are drifting in separate directions.

The gap between the two is measurable. Ripple bought back $750 million of its own shares in March at a $50 billion valuation, up from $40 billion in November, and now says it is on track for a $900 million annual revenue run rate. XRP, meanwhile, trades at $1.29 — 30% below where it started the year, half its price of a year ago, and 64.6% under its $3.65 record from July 2025.

That divergence frames the questions hanging over this week's conference: Is Ripple leaving XRP behind? Will the new partnerships actually help the token? And what does the price chart show next?

Garlinghouse addressed the concern directly from the Swell stage, and his remarks circulated widely on X:

WOW: Brad Garlinghouse just made it CRYSTAL CLEAR at @Ripple Swell: $XRP remains Ripple's TOP PRIORITY! Despite Ripple's massive expansion into stablecoins, custody, payments and institutional finance, Brad declared: “We only want to do things that are good for XRP.” An… pic.twitter.com/CgAhbyqfXf

— ALLINCRYPTO (@RealAllinCrypto) October 29, 2026

(Source on X)

Why Holders Worry Ripple and XRP Are Drifting Apart

Nearly every deal Ripple signed this month runs on its RLUSD stablecoin, and the revenue it generates flows to Ripple's shareholders rather than to XRP holders. The announcements during Swell week made the pattern hard to miss:

• Robinhood will settle institutional trades in RLUSD on the XRP Ledger.
• Coinbase listed RLUSD for U.S. clients on Wednesday.
• Moody's rated RLUSD A2, an upper-medium investment-grade rating.
• The OCC gave final approval to Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally chartered institution that will hold RLUSD's reserves. XRP has no named role in it.
• The DTCC: Ripple Prime sits in the Wall Street clearing house's tokenization group of about 50 firms, but the first live trades in July ran on DTCC's own network and Canton. The XRP Ledger was not part of them.

Ripple's own scorecard reads the same way. Its Swell release puts RLUSD at $2.6 billion, up more than 88% this year, and counts more than 1,700 institutional customers. XRP gets a single line — as an asset Ripple uses to move money — with no figures attached.

Garlinghouse knows how this looks. He told the Swell stage that Ripple “will never give up on XRP” and called the token and RLUSD “very complementary.”

The structure behind the worry has not changed, though. Owning XRP does not make you a Ripple shareholder. When Ripple bought back stock in March, the $750 million went to investors and employees holding its private shares.

Will XRP Benefit From Ripple's New Deals?

Some, but far less directly than the headlines suggest. A bank settling RLUSD on the XRP Ledger pays its network fee in XRP, and that fee is burned — permanently removing those tokens from supply — but the amounts are tiny.

The ledger's own supply count shows how tiny. A check of the XRP Ledger on October 29 found that 153,989 XRP has been burned in fees since January 1, about $199,000 at current prices. Over the past 30 days the figure was 27,573 XRP, roughly $35,600.

Compare that with Ripple's escrow, which releases 1 billion XRP every month on an on-chain schedule anyone can verify. The 1 billion unlocked on October 1 is still sitting in the two Ripple wallets that received it, 500 million each. Another 1 billion unlocks on Sunday, November 1. A month of fees burns less than 0.003% of a single month's unlock.

The demand that matters for the price has to come from people holding XRP, and there the picture is mixed — with fund flows one of the few public, day-by-day gauges of institutional demand:

• Funds: U.S. spot XRP ETFs hold about $1.5 billion, but took in nothing on Tuesday after a $3.61 million outflow on Monday.
• Custody and collateral: BNY now holds XRP for institutional clients, and Ripple Prime accepts it as collateral. Neither has said how much.
• Treasury buyers: Evernorth, the Nasdaq-listed firm holding about 473 million XRP, signed an $80 million equity line on Monday and plans to use part of it to buy more XRP.
• Lending on the ledger: The vault and lending upgrades that would let institutions borrow against tokenized assets natively had 20 and 18 validator votes on October 21. Each needs 25, and there is no activation date.

That last item is the one XRP holders should follow. On the XRP Ledger, protocol upgrades stay dormant until enough validators — the operators who run the network's consensus — signal support, which is why the vote count is the number to watch. Payments and stablecoins use XRP as a fee. Lending would use it as collateral, with tokens locked up instead of burned in fractions of a cent.

Price Check: Can XRP Hold $1.25?

It has held so far, but on the weekly chart XRP sits below the two moving averages that matter. It trades at $1.29, under its 200-week exponential moving average (EMA) at $1.3715 and its 50-week EMA at $1.4928. It has closed three weeks in a row below the 200-week line.

The 16-month chart shows a market that keeps selling rallies. XRP slid from its $3.65 record in July 2025 into a range between roughly $1.00 and $1.70 that has held since June. August's one-week jump from $0.986 to $1.70 faded, and September's push to $1.658 stalled near the 50-week EMA.

Resistance: $1.3715, the 200-week EMA, then $1.4928, the 50-week EMA. Above those sits $1.6999, the August high.

Support: $1.2468, the September 16 low, which held again at $1.2546 last week. Under that, $0.9862, the August 14 low and the bottom of 2026 so far.

For XRP news to move the price, two things bear watching after Swell: whether the 1 billion XRP unlocked on Sunday stays put, and whether the lending upgrade climbs from 18 votes to 25.

Source: 99Bitcoins