Canary Capital’s Steven McClurg recently said that Bitcoin has already reached its peak for this market cycle and may be heading into a downturn. Normally, when Bitcoin falls, altcoins like XRP also move lower. However, XRP is behaving differently.
“Just watching XRP perform as everything’s going straight down and we continue to get inflows every day and continue to hold up,” he said, adds to his conviction that XRP could reach another peak in 2026, even as much of the broader crypto market struggles
There were discussions about accelerating activity on the XRP Ledger, including Ripple’s newly launched stablecoin, as evidence that institutional interest is rooted in infrastructure rather than price momentum.
“There’s so many advancements being made on the XRP ledger,” McClurg said, adding that global capital markets “really understand what’s being built there.” For ETF veterans, the scale of the launch itself is telling. “Anybody who’s ever launched an ETF before knows that if you can get to $5 million in AUM by the end of the first year, then you’re rocking it,” McClurg said.
By that standard, XRP’s debut is not merely successful, it is anomalous. The takeaway for investors is not that XRP ETFs will replace Bitcoin’s dominance, but that they may serve a different purpose.
Where Bitcoin ETFs institutionalized digital gold, and Ethereum ETFs cautiously extended that thesis to smart contracts, XRP ETFs appear to be positioning themselves as a bet on payments infrastructure and real-world financial plumbing.
If that thesis holds, XRP’s ETF story may end up being less about cycles, and more about whether Wall Street believes blockchains can finally move money better than banks already do.
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