Is XRP Ledger usage growing or shrinking?

The full answer

The answer depends on what is counted. Counted by accounts, use of the XRP Ledger shrank over the year to Q2 2026. Counted by the amount traded on its built-in exchange, it grew.

Evernorth, a company that has bought XRP itself (see the last section), published a Q2 2026 liquidity report on September 2, 2026. It found that accounts transacting on the ledger “averaged 16,587 a day and new accounts 2,783, both down approximately 25% from the prior year period.”[1] Blockworks’ Q2 report, as summarised by KuCoin, showed the same direction: about 16,800 daily active addresses, down 10.7% on Q1 and 24.5% on a year earlier, and 222.4 million transactions, 6.5% fewer than Q1’s record.[3]

Trading moved the other way. Evernorth reported that “order-book trading reached 3.57 million XRP per day, 79% above a year earlier,” while the number of accounts starting those trades went from 1,864 to 1,111 a day. Each of those accounts bought or sold 3,217 XRP a day, against 1,072 a year earlier.[1] Counting both the order book and AMM pools, DEX trading ran at 4.42 million XRP a day, about 20% above a year earlier.[1] Stablecoin balances also rose: RLUSD averaged $539 million in Q2, against $73 million a year earlier.[1]

Who are the fewer but larger users driving XRP moved per trader up?

No published source names them. Evernorth counts an account as “one ledger address that submitted a transaction,” and it rebuilds its figures from Dune’s XRP Ledger tables.[1] CoinDesk, reporting the same data, noted that “an account is not necessarily one person” and that the data “cannot show whether institutions are replacing retail traders.”[2]

Two sources point to machines. Bitquery, a blockchain data firm, classed 283 accounts as DEX order bots in August 2026, sending 48.1% of all transactions that month.[4] In April 2026, validator operator Vet said in an X post reported by U.Today that “nearly all activity on the DEX came from this pair and associated bots,” the pair U.Today names as XRP/RLUSD, and that the bots keep replacing their offers to adjust prices.[6] Evernorth also reported that the order book’s share of DEX trading rose to 81% from 54% a year earlier, while trading through XRP-paired AMM pools fell 74% over six quarters.[1] Our reading of Evernorth’s per-account figures and CoinDesk’s caveat is that bigger trades per account fit market makers and larger traders, and do not show that institutions arrived. Whether institutional announcements have turned into activity on the ledger is on XRPL announcements becoming products.

Did the Q2 pattern continue in Q3?

The full Q3 figures were not published as of September 29, 2026. Partial data points in both directions.

Transactions rose. CryptoSlate, reporting Bitquery’s data, said XRP Ledger accounts sent 81.56 million transactions in August 2026.[5] That is about 2.63 million a day, above Q2’s 2.44 million (our calculation). But Bitquery found that 793 accounts sent 93.2% of them, and that the number of accounts behaving like ordinary users was 191,761 in August 2026, against 196,240 in January 2018: “Eight and a half years, no growth.”[4]

DEX trading surged and then cooled. On September 12, 2026, CryptoSlate reported $253.1 million of DEX volume in the latest 30 days, against $100.4 million in the 30 days before, using DefiLlama data.[8] By September 29, DefiLlama’s seven-day DEX volume was $57.99 million, down 9.32% on the week.[7] The detail is on XRPL DEX trading volume.

DefiLlama showed 45,184 active addresses over the 24 hours to September 29, 2026.[7] Evernorth counts accounts daily and averages them over a quarter, so a single-day figure cannot be compared with its quarterly average to measure a trend.

Is this explosive or exponential growth?

Not by the account counts. A fall of about a quarter in daily and new accounts over a year is a decline.[1][3] The growth is in value held on the ledger, which Evernorth says rose from $99 million to $4.26 billion across six quarters,[1] and in trading per account. Whether 2026 rates can continue is argued on will XRP growth rates continue.

What is the strongest case against reading this as growth?

Bitquery’s study is the sharpest. It argues that almost all ledger traffic comes from a few hundred automated accounts and that ordinary-looking accounts numbered about the same in August 2026 as in January 2018.[4] Its method and the replies to it are on how much XRP Ledger activity is bots, spam or wash trading. The positive trading figures also come from Evernorth, which reported more than 473 million XRP purchased and committed as of November 4, 2025.[9] Evernorth’s Q2 2026 report says retail stepped back across the whole market in the quarter, but this page has not checked whether other chains lost active accounts over the same period; see XRP Ledger activity versus other chains.