XRP Ledger Weekly Data Report — Week of September 28–October 4, 2026

How to read this report

Every metric below carries its source and its snapshot date, and we do not publish figures we cannot trace to a public source. Where two methodologies disagree — circulating supply and RLUSD's total are the standing cases — we show both and say why. Where a metric's freshest verified reading is older than this week, we date it honestly rather than extrapolate. This week the policy mattered in an unusual direction: the tape was so quiet that almost every interesting number came from flows and structure — the escrow cycle, the ETF complex's cost basis, the RLUSD attestation — rather than from price, and several of those arrive from multiple sources that disagree by a rounding. Each disagreement is shown rather than resolved.

Three mechanical rules follow from the policy. First, we do not average across methodologies: where a tracker and an issuer print different values for the same quantity, both are published with attribution. Second, we do not refresh a metric for appearance's sake — the options-implied-move line and the rival-stablecoin lines could not be re-verified this week and are carried with their original dates. Third, we label estimates as estimates: the lost-XRP line remains an estimate with a stated basis, and derived lines are marked calculated with their inputs shown.

So that the reader can see exactly how much of this report is this week's and how much is carried, here is the verification log for the edition.

1. Market metrics

The tape story of the week is compression. After a quarter in which weekly moves ran +30%, −11%, −3%, +7% and +8%, the Sep 28–Oct 4 week produced +0.7% on this site's Sunday-to-Sunday series — and even that number flatters the motion, because intraday highs stepped down three times ($1.5784 → $1.5552 → $1.5472) while the lows never broke $1.4537. That geometry is a descending triangle: sellers pressing into an unbroken floor. The volatility signature matches — a 7-day standard deviation of 0.010 against a 30-day of 0.037, roughly a quarter of the recent norm, with the week's heaviest session ($5.02B, Sep 28) decaying into a $1.36B Sunday (CoinMarketCap; AnalystMarkets digest, Oct 4).

Two source-cut caveats belong next to the price. First, the weekly change itself: anchored to the prior edition's published close ($1.5098, Yahoo convention) the week reads +0.7%; anchored to trackers whose own Sep 27 close printed $1.5184, it reads +0.1% to +0.2% (AnalystMarkets: +0.2%; CoinLore: −0.1% on a rolling 7-day). All are true at their own cuts; the week's substance is identical whichever pair you quote. Second, the shape-versus-level distinction: Oct 4's $1.5202 close is the week's highest close and reclaimed the 20-day moving average (~$1.466) after six sessions below it (Guavy; Oct 4 close) — so the triangle resolved nothing yet, but the Oct 4 close is the first bullish datum inside it.

The cross-asset frame: Bitcoin opened the week near $84,472 and closed it at $86,474 (+2.4%, high $87,220), Ether added +1.6%, and total crypto capitalization rose +1.8% to $2.92 trillion with Bitcoin dominance at 59.3% and Fear & Greed at 65 (AnalystMarkets, Oct 4). XRP's +0.7% therefore trailed both majors — the week's relative-strength reading of −2.2pp versus BTC extends a September pattern in which XRP's +7.94% month ranked second-weakest among the top ten assets, ahead of only TRON (CoinMarketCap via BigGo, Sep 29).

2. Supply, custody & escrow

Why two circulating-supply numbers: market-data aggregators apply their own methodology — chiefly Ripple's distribution API estimate, which nets out certain classified holdings — to the ledger's raw activated supply. The 63.1B figure is what the market cap is computed against; XRPScan's ledger basis printed 68.42B after the October 1 cycle. This site's own map arithmetic (100B − 31.54B escrow − 0.531B lost − 0.0144B burned) gives ≈67.9B; the ~0.5B difference versus XRPScan's print is the lost-coin convention, and both versions are shown rather than blended.

The escrow line is this section's event. The October 1 window released 1 billion XRP in four EscrowFinish transactions — 400M (~$595.6M), 300M (~$446.7M), 200M (~$297.8M), 100M (~$148.9M), ~$1.49B combined — and re-locked 700 million within hours in two EscrowCreate transactions of 400M and 300M (Whale Alert via TheStreet/Yahoo; U.Today via RippleCoinNews; CoinAlertNews, Oct 1). Net float added: 300 million, identical to September's cycle and at the top of the historical 200–300M range. The escrow balance moved 31.98B → 31.54B across the cycle; the arithmetic from last week's read predicts 31.68B, and the extra ~140M step-down reflects other contracts expiring inside the window rather than faster-than-reported spending. The market's reaction to the whole mechanism: a ~4% daily move attributed by Finbold to broader market flows, not the unlock.

The custody map beneath the escrow line is unchanged and still does the structural work. Exchanges (20.32B, Sep 26 read) hold roughly seventeen times what ETFs do (1.18B), venue order books remain the marginal price-setter, and the one official update this week is on the treasury line: Evernorth Holdings confirmed ~473 million XRP at closing — the largest publicly traded pure-play XRP treasury — with Nasdaq trading under XRPN expected within days (Evernorth press release, Oct 1). The category is small in absolute terms, verifiable by charter, and now has a listed vehicle attached.

3. Network activity

The transaction line carries its September compilation for a second week — no fresh verified weekly count surfaced — but the payment-volume print is this section's news, and it arrives with unusual texture. On September 29, ledger payment volume jumped 35.1% to 929 million XRP, well above the ~615M 30-day average, then fell back 23.8% to 708.6M the next day while remaining above the updated 624.2M average (PrimeXBT, Oct 1). The spike ran against price — XRP was drifting lower through it — which is the opposite of the retail-churn signature and consistent with settlement-shaped flow: payments that move because someone needed to move value, not because a chart told them to.

The x402 line is the quarter's quietest compounding story. Crossing 10 million AI-agent payments in under three months from the 1M mark implies the daily rate accelerated roughly an order of magnitude inside the window, and the standing run-rate is now 600,000+ payments clearing daily. The honest counterweight sits in the same dashboard: cumulative value settled through the AI Hub rails is ~6,610 XRP and ~9,870 RLUSD across 161 merchants — real frequency at near-zero ticket size. This is infrastructure adoption, not revenue adoption; the Stripe integration reported this week (Yahoo Finance, Oct 2) is the first signal that payment processors see the same shape. The DefiLlama DEX line ($55.1M/7d, Sep 24–25) had no citable refresh this week and is carried rather than restated.

4. RLUSD stablecoin

This section now carries four dated reads of the same quantity, and the spread is itself informative. The August 31 attestation — the only independent examination in the set — recorded 2,325,969,308 tokens against $2.446B of reserves. The September 24 dashboard showed $2.409B circulating against $2.5315B of reserves, a coverage ratio above 100% on both official reads. The issuer's own September 30 claim was "~$2.4B, up more than 50% in a month" — a figure that only reconciles from an early-August base, not from the attestation's $2.326B (which implies +5–7% for September), and we present the claim attributed rather than adopted. The DefiLlama tracker prints ~$2.52B in early October. Every read agrees on the direction and the level to within ~5%; none is the other, and the attestation remains the number this site weights most.

The chain split remains the most consequential line, and September's movement within it matters more than the total. The XRPL-side balance grew +7.76% over the month against Ethereum's +6.61% — the ledger side out-growing ETH for the period, even as the absolute gap widened to $280M because Ethereum started larger. Off-ledger demand evidence also accumulated: RLUSD/USDS on Spark's Stablecoin FX Layer processed over $600M in its first week on Uniswap v4 (99Bitcoins via The Bitstream, Oct 2) — the first flow-sized datum supporting the settlement-rail thesis over the trading-stablecoin thesis. The mechanism most likely to close the $280M gap remains collateral demand from XRP holders; its usage data is still unpublished, and the coverage note carries that omission for a third edition.

5. ETF flows & derivatives

The streak survived its thinnest week, and the composition tells the story. The week ending October 2 printed +$4.74M — 6% of the prior week's $75.6M and roughly a quarter of the drought-week $9.57M three weeks before — yet it still extends the run to 12 consecutive positive weeks (SoSoValue via PANews/Odaily; week ending Oct 2). The inversion is the datum: Bitwise, which had defined nearly every strong session since August, posted its first net-negative week (−$0.102M) with a −$3.28M session on October 2 — its second red session ever, after September 2 — while Franklin (+$4.065M, cumulative ~$505M) and Canary (+$0.781M, ~$490M) carried the week (Odaily, Oct 3; Check Crypto News). Three active books is structurally better than one; no book pressing is directionally worse than one pressing. Both facts price in.

The level behind the flows is now a $133M gap. Cumulative contributed capital of ~$1.79B against $1.66B of net assets means the complex's average dollar is under water by more than 7% of contributed capital — a gap that widened from ~$100M a week earlier even though redemptions were minimal (only Bitwise moved on Oct 2; the rest of the NAV decline was price) (SoSoValue via Check Crypto News; Oct 2 read). The comparative frame arrived the same week: Solana's ETF complex overtook XRP's in assets — about $1.91B versus $1.66B — on fewer contributed dollars ($1.61B cumulative), because SOL's book holds newer, cheaper basis (Bitcoin.com News via Check Crypto News, Oct 2). The ETF net-asset ratio printed 1.79% of XRP's market cap (PANews; Oct 2 data). For September in full: $121.4M against August's record ≈$159.2M — second-best month ever, with one squeeze week carrying 62% of it (calculated from sourced weekly prints).

Derivatives ran a full leverage lap inside the week. Binance XRP perp OI — which had run from ~$220M in mid-September to nearly $600M — fell 15.3% from its six-month high to ~$485M by October 1 (CryptoQuant via PrimeXBT), then rebuilt to $580M on October 2 as the jobs-print pump drew longs back, with Hyperliquid rising from $284M to $314M and OI-weighted funding at +0.01%, the highest since September 23 (CoinGlass via CoinGape, Oct 2). The full-market caveat: no total OI print was published inside the window, so the September 23 record of $4.10 billion stands as the last dated full-market read, carried rather than restated. The honest calibration: the venue books dipped and rebuilt inside a four-cent range, and a market whose marginal volume runs at many multiples of spot is a market where the range will end mechanically rather than gradually.

6. The week in one table

A quiet week is best read against the week that preceded it. The table puts the two side by side for the six metrics that carried the most information.

The row that deserves the longest look is the ETF gap one, because it changed regime. For two editions this site has documented the contributed-capital-versus-assets gap as a footnote — $20M, then widening — and this week it is $133M, the largest of the complex's life, accumulated almost entirely through price rather than redemption. The mechanical consequence: every future inflow dollar buys more XRP per dollar than the complex's average holding cost, and every outflow dollar crystallizes an average loss. That asymmetry is why the composition flip matters more than the total — Bitwise's blink was the first test of what an under-water complex's largest holder does when the discount widens, and the answer, so far, was "hesitate." Whether the second and third books inherit the demand or merely rotate it is October's flow question.

Sentiment & the week ahead

Sentiment cooled from the prior week's greed plateau without breaking: the Fear & Greed index printed 72 on October 1, 67 on October 2 and 65 ("Greed") at the Oct 4 close, against 70–74 readings throughout the prior week (The CryptoBase, Oct 2; AnalystMarkets digest, Oct 4). A range-bound index across a range-bound tape is the expected pairing; the notable part is that the quarter's biggest structural news (stories the News Review ranks 2 and 3) moved it not at all.

The week ahead is the densest calendar of the quarter. Evernorth's business combination is expected to close within days, and XRPN is set to begin Nasdaq trading alongside it; PermissionDelegationV1_1's projected activation lands midweek at ~21:25 UTC, with the fixBatchV1_2 and BatchV1_1 activations the next session at ~14:13 and ~14:46 UTC — with the xrpld 3.4.1 emergency release a prerequisite for any server that wants to stay in consensus (XRPScan via Cryptured; Gate.io; CoinTurk; Evernorth, Oct 1–4). the Fed decision follows later this month, now priced at 71.8–77.9% hold odds (CME FedWatch via Cryptopple / Coin Edition, Oct 2). and Ripple's Swell conference in New York follows at month's end (TokenPost, Oct 1). Two of those events — the amendment window and the XRPN debut — are mechanism events with binary outcomes; the seasonality frame around them is hostile, with October historically XRP's weakest month at a mean near −4.71% (CryptoRank via TheChainPost, Oct 1).

The structural question the data poses is unchanged from last week and now has a sharper edge: exchanges hold roughly seventeen times what ETFs do, venue order books still set the marginal price, and the Bitget hoard's 102.9M XRP sits in identified-but-unfrozen wallets. What changed this week is that the alternative bid structures both advanced — an ETF complex pausing to let its cost basis catch up, and a treasury company one week from listing. October will show, at mechanism resolution, which book the market actually pays.

FAQ

Related reading

• XRP & Ripple Weekly News Review — Week of September 28–October 4, 2026
• Weekly Intelligence — October 4, 2026
• XRP Market Report — September 2026
• The Second Book: Evernorth, XRPN and the Treasury Bid for XRP