Ripple Strengthens Custody While XRP Slides: A Contradiction in Strategy?

In February 2026, Ripple announced significant partnerships with Figment and Securosys, substantially upgrading its institutional custody and staking services. These moves aggressively expand Ripple’s enterprise infrastructure, yet contrast sharply with XRP’s market performance, which has declined nearly 32% over the past month.

This divergence is critical as it highlights the evolving, complex relationship between a blockchain company’s operational strategy and the market valuation of its associated digital asset. For the crypto industry, it underscores a pivotal question: will deep institutional infrastructure development ultimately drive retail and public market success, or are these becoming increasingly separate paths?

Ripple Doubles Down on Institutional Infrastructure

Ripple made a decisive move to cement its position in the institutional digital asset space, unveiling two key partnerships aimed at supercharging its Ripple Custody solution. The company is collaborating with Figment, a leading institutional staking provider, and Securosys, a specialist in high-security hardware (HSM) solutions.

The partnership with Figment is strategically focused on institutional staking services. This integration allows banks, regulated custodians, and other financial entities using Ripple Custody to offer staking rewards to their clients without the operational burden of running validator infrastructure. Through Figment’s platform, institutions can securely stake assets on major networks like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), tapping into a new revenue stream while maintaining strict compliance and security standards.

Concurrently, the alliance with Securosys tackles a foundational challenge in digital asset custody: secure key management. By integrating Securosys’s CyberVault HSM and CloudHSM solutions, Ripple Custody can now offer clients a more flexible and robust security layer. Institutions can choose between on-premise or cloud-based HSM deployments, addressing previous hurdles related to cost, complexity, and slow procurement. These partnerships, following Ripple’s acquisition of custody firm Palisade, signal a focused “infrastructure arms race” to build the most comprehensive, regulatory-friendly platform for traditional finance.

The Market’s Muted Response: XRP’s Price and On-Chain Reality

Despite these substantial corporate developments, the market response for Ripple’s native digital asset,** **XRP, has been conspicuously negative. At the time of writing, XRP is trading around $1.44, reflecting a decline of nearly 32% over the past month. This downtrend largely mirrors the broader crypto market correction but appears disconnected from Ripple’s bullish enterprise news.

On-chain metrics from the XRP Ledger (XRPL) further illustrate this disconnect. Data from DeFiLlama shows that the Total Value Locked (TVL) on the XRPL has cooled significantly, falling from approximately $80 million in early January to about $49.6 million. This suggests subdued activity in the network’s public DeFi ecosystem. Similarly, while stablecoin market cap on the XRPL has grown to around $415 million, the pace is steady rather than explosive.

This creates a clear narrative tension: Ripple is aggressively building enterprise-grade infrastructure for institutions, yet the public, tradable metric of its success—the XRP token—and the utility of its public ledger are not currently reflecting that effort. It highlights a potential bifurcation between Ripple’s business-to-business (B2B) strategy and the retail-driven market dynamics of the XRP token.

An Analyst’s Counter-Narrative: The Case for XRP’s Imminent Strength

Amidst the price slump and cool on-chain data, a compelling counter-narrative has emerged from market analysts. Notably, analyst CryptoInsightUK has presented a technical case arguing that XRP is primed to outperform major rivals like Ethereum and potentially challenge Bitcoin in the coming cycle.

The analysis hinges on several key observations of relative strength. First, the XRP/ETH trading pair has been consolidating in a tight range since August 2025, which is often interpreted as a period of accumulation and strength-building before a significant move. Second, during the market-wide crash in early February 2026, the XRP/BTC pair demonstrated resilience, quickly reversing a breakdown—a sign that selling pressure against Bitcoin was limited.

Furthermore, the analyst points to substantial short liquidity pools sitting above** **XRP’s current price, particularly around $2.29, $3.60 (its previous all-time high), and between $4.20-$4.40. These zones represent concentrations of leveraged short positions that could fuel a rapid, short-squeeze-driven rally if XRP’s price begins to climb. From a dominance perspective, XRP’s share of the total crypto market cap has defended a major support level near 3.6%, recently bouncing with a bullish candlestick pattern, suggesting underlying demand.

Key Pillars of the Bullish XRP Thesis

Relative Strength: XRP has shown resilience against both ETH and BTC during market downturns, indicating it is not being disproportionately sold.

Consolidation Pattern: A multi-month range-bound period against Ethereum is viewed as a classic basing pattern that often precedes upward breakouts.

Liquidation Fuel: Large clusters of short positions at higher prices create the potential for explosive upside moves if triggered.

Macro Rotation Potential: Even a minor shift of capital from massive traditional markets like gold and silver into crypto could disproportionately benefit assets perceived as undervalued.

Deciphering the Disconnect: Infrastructure vs. Speculation

The central puzzle—strong institutional development paired with weak token performance—can be understood by examining Ripple’s specific strategy and market mechanics. Ripple’s core focus with its custody and settlement solutions is on regulated, permissioned financial use cases. These include cross-border payments for banks, treasury management for corporations, and secure custody for asset managers. Success in these areas is measured by contracts signed, transaction volume processed, and regulatory licenses obtained, not necessarily by public blockchain TVL or token price in the short term.

Much of this institutional activity may occur on private, permissioned versions of Ripple’s technology or through channels that do not directly or immediately increase on-chain demand for XRP. Therefore, traditional DeFi metrics like TVL may be a poor indicator of Ripple’s enterprise progress. The current market downturn is overwhelmingly driven by macro sentiment, ETF flows, and leveraged derivative positions, which can overshadow positive fundamental developments from a single company, even one as significant as Ripple.

This situation frames a critical investment thesis: Is the market undervaluing XRP by failing to price in Ripple’s methodical, long-term institutional groundwork? Or is Ripple’s business success becoming increasingly decoupled from the utility and value of the XRP token itself? The answer likely lies in whether Ripple’s infrastructure push can eventually catalyze a substantial, net-positive increase in XRP’s transactional utility and demand.

What is Ripple’s Ecosystem? XRP, XRPL, and the Enterprise Focus

To fully grasp the dynamics at play, a clear understanding of the key components is essential.

What is Ripple? Ripple is a fintech company that develops and promotes blockchain-based solutions primarily for financial institutions. Its core products focus on cross-border payment settlement (RippleNet), liquidity management, and digital asset custody.

What is the XRP Ledger (XRPL)? The XRPL is an open-source, decentralized, public blockchain that predates the company Ripple. It is optimized for fast (3-5 second settlement), low-cost, and energy-efficient transactions. It supports tokens, a built-in decentralized exchange (DEX), and smart contracts.

What is XRP? XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger. It serves three primary functions: a** ****bridge currencyto facilitate cross-border value transfers, a transaction fee asset (to prevent spam), and, within Ripple’s new institutional DeFi vision, a potential **collateral asset.

The Relationship: Ripple is the XRPL’s largest contributor and most prominent commercial advocate. The company holds a significant treasury of XRP and its business strategy is designed to drive utility and demand for the XRP token, particularly within institutional finance. However, the XRPL and XRP exist independently of the company.

The Path Forward: Will the Twain Ever Meet?

The coming months will be crucial in determining whether Ripple’s institutional strategy can bridge the gap with** **XRP’s market performance. Several potential paths exist.

If the broader crypto market finds a sustainable bottom and enters a new phase of risk-on sentiment, XRP—with its strong relative strength indicators and large short positions overhead—could be poised for a dramatic rally that validates the bullish analyst thesis. Such a move would likely be interpreted as the market “catching up” to Ripple’s fundamental progress.

Alternatively, the decoupling could persist or even widen. Ripple may continue to succeed as a B2B enterprise software and services company, building valuable infrastructure, while XRP trades primarily as a speculative asset influenced more by macro tides and crypto market narratives than by Ripple’s partnership announcements. This would represent a significant evolution from the original “XRP-as-fuel” vision.

The most likely scenario is a delayed correlation. Ripple’s current infrastructure push, including easier staking and fortified custody, is about removing barriers to entry for the most risk-averse capital. The real impact on XRP demand may materialize with a lag, once these institutions are fully onboarded and begin utilizing the asset at scale for settlements, collateral, and payments. The partnerships with Figment and Securosys are not endpoints; they are the plumbing that must be installed before the water—institutional capital—can flow.

Conclusion: A Test of Patience and Thesis

Ripple’s latest moves reveal a company executing a long-term, institutional-first playbook with precision. The partnerships with Figment and Securosys are logical, substantive steps that address real needs in the professional digital asset space. However, in the mercurial world of crypto markets, such foundational work often goes unrewarded in the short term, as evidenced by XRP’s continued price struggle.

This moment serves as a litmus test for different types of investors. For the institution slowly evaluating custody options, Ripple’s news is unequivocally positive. For the trader looking at charts, XRP presents a compelling technical setup amid bearish sentiment. For the long-term believer in the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance, Ripple is building the necessary bridges, even if the traffic across them is not yet visible on the public ledger.

The story of 2026 for Ripple and XRP is thus one of strategic depth versus market impatience. Whether the company’s relentless focus on the institutional backend will ultimately power the front-end token’s success remains the billion-dollar question. One thing is clear: Ripple is playing a different game than most of crypto, and the final score may take years to fully materialize.