XRP Ledger Order-Book Volume Rises 79% While Trader Count Drops

Order-book trading on the XRP Ledger averaged 3.57 million XRP a day in the second quarter, up 79% from 1.99 million a year earlier. The accounts doing that trading fell to 1,111 a day from 1,864. Volume per trading account came close to tripling, to 3,217 XRP a day from 1,072. The figures come from Evernorth's quarterly liquidity report, published on 2 September and covering the three months to 30 June. Five outlets carry the same headline numbers. They part company on the percentages attached to them.

The counts agree, the percentages do not

Same inputs, different arithmetic. CoinDesk puts the decline in order-book traders at 41%; crypto.news, PrimeXBT and The Cryptonomist each call it 40%, and all four start from 1,864 and 1,111. Transacting accounts averaged 16,587 a day, down 24% on CoinDesk's count and 25% on the other three, and only CoinDesk publishes a prior-year base, at about 21,900. Balances of RLUSD grew 639% at CoinDesk and 642% everywhere else, from the same $73 million to the same $539 million. None of the gaps is large. None of them reconciles either, and no outlet acknowledges another's version.

One number nobody else reports

CoinDesk carries a metric the rest leave out. The count of assets XRP traded against on the order book fell to about 319 a day from 480, which it describes as down 18% on the year and the lowest of the six quarters the report covers. Those two figures are a fall of about a third, not 18%. We could not establish which of the two the report itself states, and no second account carries the metric at all. Read against the volume figures, the direction at least is consistent: more XRP moving across fewer pairs, in fewer hands.

The stablecoin is doing the growing

RLUSD, Ripple's dollar stablecoin, is the fastest-moving line in the report. Average balances held on the ledger reached $539 million against $73 million a year earlier, and RLUSD's share of its own total supply sitting on the XRP Ledger rose from 20% to 34%. Value transferred in RLUSD rose 925% year on year, a figure three outlets carry in near-identical wording, which reads as one line repeated. crypto.news alone adds that end-of-June supply was $676.9 million and that RLUSD passed $1 billion on the ledger on 28 August. Total value held averaged $4.26 billion for the quarter, the highest of the six quarters measured, against $99 million six quarters earlier. The tokenized-asset component of $3.72 billion appears in CoinDesk's account and nowhere else.

Who is counting

The publisher has a position in the asset. Evernorth is an XRP treasury company preparing a Nasdaq listing, which CoinDesk states and the other accounts reviewed here do not. That does not make the on-chain figures wrong. It is the kind of disclosure a reader needs before weighing them. The report also offers a cause for the concentration inside its own numbers: permissioned domains and permissioned trading, features that restrict a market to approved participants, arrived on the ledger in February, and institutions trade in larger tickets than retail accounts do.

"Fewer accounts were responsible for heavier trading activity during the three months through June, creating a more concentrated market," crypto.news wrote in its account of the report on 2 September.

The ledger's roadmap points the same institutional way, with Ripple setting out a four-stage path to a quantum-safe ledger through 2028. Positioning off the chain has gone the other direction, where leveraged funds doubled their net short on CME futures during a rally. Whether 1,111 accounts was a floor or a waypoint is a question the third-quarter report answers. This one does not.