XRPL daily transactions rise 8.9% as XRP reclaims $1.43

XRP reclaimed $1.43 on Friday with an 8% move, as activity on the XRP Ledger jumped. The network processed 2,344,225 transactions across the 24 hours through September 18, an 8.9% rise from the day before and well above its 30-day average of roughly 2 million, per XRPScan data.

The print added to a run that has lifted XRP about 26% over the past 30 days, even as the token remains roughly 54% below its level a year ago, per CryptoSlate's XRP data panel.

What The Ledger Actually Shows

The headline transaction count hides a more detailed picture. On September 18, total XRPL transactions reached about 2.2 million, up 23.9% on the day, while successful transactions climbed 11.2% to 1.5 million. Payments came in at roughly 757,400, and the value moving across the network, daily payment volume, reached about 1.16 billion XRP, more than double the 30-day average of 494.6 million XRP, per XRPL data published by TokenPost.

Active accounts on the network rose 21.5% to about 18,700, a useful sign that more participants, not just bigger transactions from existing ones, were active on the day. Total active users, however, dropped 17.3% to about 155,300, TokenPost notes, which suggests the payment volume surge partly reflects larger transfers from regular users rather than a wave of new addresses.

Fee burns, the amount of XRP destroyed each time a transaction settles, came in at 337.2 XRP on September 17, slightly above the 30-day average of around 319 XRP, per XRPL data reported by 36Crypto. That signals real network demand, but the burned amount is still tiny against XRP's circulating supply of about 62.88 billion tokens, so it cannot move the price on its own.

Why The Price Moved

The $1.43 print came after a sharp short squeeze. About $8.05 million in short positions were liquidated as XRP pushed past $1.40, while about $2.36 million in longs were stopped out at the same time, per Blockonomi. Total liquidations across the crypto market reached roughly $300 million as Bitcoin pushed back above $81,000.

Spot trading volume on XRP ran at $1.36 billion across the same 24-hour stretch, almost 90% higher than the day before, while futures volume hit $5.71 billion, more than four times the spot figure. When derivatives dominate spot that hard, rallies often face reversal risk once the leveraged positions unwind.

Two catalysts under the price action drew genuine attention. Ripple connected XRP to Stripe's agentic payments framework, the system that lets AI agents transact on a user's behalf, and notably settled those sessions in XRP rather than in Ripple's own dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, per WalletInvestor. Separately, Evernorth, the largest XRP treasury firm, raised $30 million from South Korean investor NH Investment & Securities in convertible notes earmarked for more XRP purchases.

The Regulatory Backdrop

The XRPL run follows a rough patch that started on September 15, when the US Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, a bill that would have set out a federal framework for digital assets. The procedural vote needed 60 votes and fell short, per Coin-Turk. XRP fell about 15% on the 30-minute chart as the news hit, dragging toward the $1.27 support zone that bulls had defended through the summer.

By Friday, the picture had flipped. With CLARITY off the table and Congress heading into recess before the midterm elections, traders began treating the absence of new rules as priced in, and attention returned to on-chain flows and treasury demand.

Infrastructure: The 3.4.0 Upgrade and The Lending Protocol

XRPL 3.4.0 went live this week. The release introduces LendingProtocolV1_1, a cleanup amendment called fixCleanup3_4_0, tighter handling of incoming peer messages, and a cap on transaction-list sizes, per The Coin Republic. Server operators were advised by the XRP Ledger Foundation to upgrade to maintain service continuity.

Separately, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz reported that his private XRPL hub returned above 500 active peer connections, at 501, near a two-week high of 509, with fewer peer disconnects over the past two weeks. Schwartz's data covers his own high-capacity hub, not the full network, and he has not linked the bump directly to the 3.4.0 release.

Researchers are also hardening the network's next big feature. Common Prefix, a protocol research firm, said on September 17 that it is running formal mathematical verification on the XRPL Lending Protocol using Lean 4, a theorem-proving system. The work is meant to prove, before launch, that the lending market cannot be drained or pushed into insolvency, a direct response to the drain-and-exploit failures that have hit lending on other chains, per WalletInvestor.

The Honest Caveats

Raw transaction counts can mislead. On September 13, ledger 106,965,249 validated 3,254 transactions, including 2,000 one-drop payments submitted by exactly 20 accounts, each sending 100 payments. The batch delivered 0.002 XRP and burned 0.111136 XRP in fees. The ledger cleared consensus, but the workload was synthetic and shows what concentrated testing looks like, per CryptoSlate.

A longer view is sharper. August saw 81.56 million XRPL transactions from 793 sender accounts, 93.2% of monthly activity, of which 767 were classified as machines. Only 2.97 million trades actually settled, from 12,153 accounts, per CryptoSlate via Voted.news. XRPL crossed 5 billion lifetime transactions during the same run.

What's Next

Traders are watching $1.45 and $1.50 as the next resistance levels. On the downside, $1.27 and $1.30 remain the support zone that bulls have defended since the summer slump, with deeper support between $1.24 and $1.25 if that breaks. XRP is also approaching a golden cross on the daily chart, with the 50-day moving average sitting about 2% below the 200-day, the narrowest gap since August 2024, per Blockonomi. The technical history here is sobering: all 16 of XRP's prior golden crosses eventually gave way to death crosses within 12 months.

For now, the move rests on three legs: a real pickup in XRPL usage, a treasury bid being topped up by Korean institutional capital, and a short squeeze that flushed leveraged bears out of $1.40. The first two are durable. The third fades.