Ripple and XRP Face Regulatory Scrutiny Amid Market Volatility

Introduction

It was another major week for Ripple and its native token, albeit not moving in the same direction. While the company announced a big partnership with Standard Chartered, XRP slumped hard during the Thursday market crash.

Ripple Partnership and Wall Street Push

One of the biggest pieces of news from the end of last week was Ripple's expansion into the leveraged ETF market on Wall Street. Through its prime brokerage platform, Ripple Prime, the company now offers swap financing. This followed its doubling down on its partnership with Brevan Howard, which expanded its services for hedge funds and investment managers.

XRP on Wall Street

Speaking of Ripple's presence on Wall Street, we need to mention Evernorth's successful debut. The XRP-holding company with 473 million tokens in its stash debuted on Nasdaq on October 12 after merging with Armada Acquisition Corp. II. On its launch day, the XRPN stock fluctuated between $16.40 and $19.40. However, the broader market correction pushed it below the lower boundary, and it closed at $15.26 yesterday. A day later, Evernorth announced how it plans to put its XRP fortune to work as it partnered with Ripple, Kraken, Coinbase, and BitGo to deploy the millions of tokens into institutional strategies starting in Q4 2026.

Ripple ETFs Demand Dries

As we reported over the weekend, demand for the spot XRP ETFs remained positive. The funds tracking the cross-border token were among the very few ending the week in the green, attracting $11.31 million. At the same time, the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs bled out heavily. However, this trend has changed. Although there are no significant outflows from the spot XRP ETFs during the current business week, demand has disappeared.

Critical XRPL Issue Fixed

The XRP Ledger Foundation clarified on October 11 that a critical integer overflow bug in the ledger's payment engine was fixed. The significance here was that this vulnerability dated to 2015 and could have allowed an attacker to mint large amounts of new XRP beyond the fixed 100 billion supply. However, the team reassured that no extra XRP was ever created, and the current circulating supply remains about 99.986 billion (deflationary due to burned fees).

XRP Price Slumps

Despite the partnerships, Evernorth's debut on Nasdaq, and the ETF flows until the end of last week, XRP's price has failed to produce any meaningful rallies. On the contrary, the asset was rejected at $1.50 last week and dipped below $1.35 within days. Although it rebounded to over $1.40 at the start of the current week, the latest market-wide pullback pushed it south yet again. This time, XRP dipped below $1.30 for the first time in a month.

Analysts Weigh In

As of now, the cross-border token trades slightly above that level, while analysts are adamant that it has shown strong signs of an upcoming recovery. Ali Martinez noted that a successful rebound from the $1.25 support could push it toward $1.42 and potentially $1.60.