Messari Report: XRP Outpaces BTC, ETH, SOL With Ecosystem Growth

• During the first quarter of 2025, XRP stood out by recording a 1.9% growth in market capitalization to $121.6 billion.
• This performance beat BTC, ETH, and SOL’s total market caps, which dipped by 22% over the same period.

In the first quarter of 2025, XRP defied broader market trends, showing signs of resilience even as other top cryptocurrencies stumbled. A report from crypto research firm Messari, titled “State of the XRP Ledger 2025,” digs into the numbers and paints a clear picture of growth, not just in XRP’s market cap, but across the XRP Ledger ecosystem.

XRPL was created by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto in 2012. It was built to make cross-border transactions faster and cheaper than traditional blockchain networks. It is also designed with energy efficiency to move away from Bitcoin’s heavy environmental footprint intentionally.

XRP finished Q1 2025 as the fourth-largest cryptocurrency in the world, with a market cap of $121.6 billion. What is special about this figure is that it came at the cost of a minimal increase in price, which was 0.5%. The rest of the growth came through a 1.4% addition to the circulating supply, adding to the total market capitalization by 1.9%.

But here’s the truly jaw-dropping fact: while Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana all lost 22% of their market capitalization over the same timeframe, XRP was firm. Even more is the year-over-year performance. From Q1 of 2024, we see that the market capitalization of Ripple has grown a staggering 252%, from $34.6 billion to more than $121 billion.

Activity on the XRP Ledger

The report takes a closer look at activity within the Ledger itself. It includes the tokens built on it in the ecosystem. Sologenic (SOLO) continues to lead as the top XRPL-issued token by market cap. The token faced some turbulence, and its valuation dropped 43% to $91.3 million, but SOLO still maintained a solid user base. The number of wallet holders dipped only slightly to 219,200.

SOLO is mainly used to pay fees on the Sologenic platform, which bridges traditional finance and blockchain-based assets.

On the other end, Ripple’s RLUSD is gaining momentum fast. It was launched a few months ago, in December. RLUSD is a stablecoin deployed on both the XRPL and Ethereum. Its growth has been explosive: a 304% increase in market cap and a 338% surge in holders, bringing the total to 32,350. RLUSD is backed by U.S. dollars and short-term Treasuries, with regular audits that add a layer of transparency, something that has helped it compete with incumbents like USDT.

Even as XRP’s own price remains flat, the ledger itself is busier than ever. Daily volume increased 13% quarter-over-quarter, operating at around 2.04 million transactions per day. That includes everything from basic payments and escrow transfers to more niche activities such as NFT burns and account deletions.

The surge in receiving accounts is a clear sign that XRPL usage is on the rise. For the fourth straight quarter, more users were receiving assets on the network than sending, a positive indicator of ecosystem activity.

The average daily number of receiving addresses soared by 168%, from 47,700 to 127,800. The number of sending accounts also increased, but at a more modest rate, up 14.5% to 34,300. This increase in receivers indicates that new use cases are attracting new users, perhaps fueled by the growth in stablecoins or new applications being developed on XRPL.