Long time holder here. I’ve been buying since 2022 and I’m still up. But the Blockworks State of XRP Q2 2026 report is bugging me and I want to hear from people who have thought about this.
The ledger had a huge quarter. Stablecoin supply jumped 195%. RLUSD alone was up 257%. Tokenized real world assets rose 102% to $4.46 billion. The network ran 222 million transactions, its second highest ever. And XRP still closed the quarter down 20% at $1.04.
Here is what bothers me. The ledger earned about $31,800 from payments and transfers in Q2 while roughly $9 billion of RLUSD moved across it. Only 40,600 XRP got burned all quarter, but around 600 million XRP came out of escrow in that same window. That is about 15,000 new coins for every 1 burned. On top of that, all ten of Ripple’s big institutional deals this year settled in RLUSD instead of XRP.
So my question is simple. If banks can use the rails without ever buying the token, what actually forces XRP demand at scale? I know the usual answers like fee burn, reserves, bridge currency, and ETF scarcity. But the Q2 data makes the first three look tiny. Is the real bull case just waiting on XLS-65 and XLS-66 lending to require the token? Or am I missing something?
I want to be talked out of this. What is the best counterargument?