etfs

You can see calls of $100,000 everywhere, but this time it doesn’t feel like just hype. As 2025 moves toward its close, #bitcoin is not moving upward. It’s tightening, building pressure, and waiting for a trigger.
Prediction markets are also predicting different prices according to time. Some say late 2025, others push the move into 2026. But when you step back and look at the broader crypto and macro picture, Bitcoin’s structure looks stronger than most people admit.
New Cycle But Different
You're seeing the decoupling of $BTC from the traditional risk assets. While equities are still with doubt and other institutional capital continues to pour in via spot #ETFs . These are not the short-term trades. They're long-term, passive allocations to quietly fight the price and suppress down-volatility.
At the same time inflation data is stabilizing. Markets are pricing in increasing financial conditions. Bitcoin does not require aggressive rate cuts. Even a mild liquidity expansion can push #BTC higher from here as we witnessed it in the past.
Myth Of Supply Shock
The 2024 halving is now fully effected. New supply is wrapping up by buyers and on-chain it's reflected from the long-term holders accumulating instead of selling. Coins are going off of exchanges, not onto them. That behavior can usually be found before major upside moves.
Next Expected Things
Technically, Bitcoin is moving inside a multi-month range. A weekly close above resistance, backed by sustained ETF volume, would invalidate bearish RSI signals and open the path toward $100K.
Keep a close eye on the #DXY and bond yields. Falling yields combined with steady ETF demand has been one of the most reliable breakout signals in previous crypto cycles.
Breaking $100K is no longer about belief. It’s about timing.

XRP ETFs are booming, but a quiet $15 billion payment layer matters more than the price

Four #Xrp🔥🔥 spot #ETFs now trade in the US, with combined assets of $941.7 million as of Dec. 18. Grayscale's GXRP holds $148.1 million, CanaryCapital's XRPC $373.6 million, Franklin Templeton's XRPZ $189 million, and Bitwise's XRP ETF $215.6 million.
That stack grew from roughly $336 million at launch in November to current levels in under two months, front-loading a lot of excitement into a narrow window.
XRP now runs two parallel stories: an ETF layer that has already captured regulated US demand, and a payments and infrastructure layer that still has to prove it can stand on its own if those flows plateau.
The question isn't whether XRP has generated interest for its ETF products, it's whether the asset has durable demand anchored in cross-border flows, stablecoin rails, and persistent liquidity that survives when ETF AUM stops climbing.
ETF exposure has already outgrown the $293 million of RLUSD sitting on XRPL as of Dec. 19, according to DefiLlama data. Still, it is not comparable in magnitude to the $15 billion in Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity processed in 2024.
That means the ETF wrapper is measurable but still relatively thin compared to the full flow running through RippleNet over a year, and to XRPL address-based and daily payments.
If ETF flows stagnate, the answer about real adoption sits in the plumbing, not the tickers.
Payments and corridor reality in 2025
RippleNet now counts more than 300 financial institutions across 55-plus countries, with roughly 40% actively using XRP for On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) rather than just messaging rails.
ODL processed more than $15 billion of cross-border payments in 2024, a 32% year-over-year increase, with Asia-Pacific accounting for roughly 56% of volume.
ODL now spans more than 70 corridor pairs and covers an estimated 80% of major global remittance corridors. DAS Research puts ODL volume at about $1.3 billion just in the second quarter of 2025 alone, framed as part of Ripple's push to make XRP a core payments infrastructure.

RippleNet as a whole, including corridors that do not yet settle in XRP, is processing more than $15 billion in cross-border transaction volume per month as of 2025.
That distinction matters: many institutions use RippleNet messaging and fiat-only settlement. XRP only appears where pre-funding costs and FX spreads justify taking token volatility risk. The relevant metrics are ODL volume, corridor coverage, and the share of partners routing traffic through XRP, not the total RippleNet client count.
Global cross-border payment volumes range from $130 trillion to $150 trillion annually, according to SWIFT-linked estimates.
Even $30 billion in annual ODL volume is meaningful for XRP but marginal for global payments. Real adoption on this axis would look like ODL volumes compounding from the current $15 billion and the baseline, more than half of RippleNet clients opting into XRP, and corridor expansion beyond the APAC remittance niches that dominate today.
On-chain activity beyond speculation
XRPL handled roughly 1.8 million transactions per day in the third quarter of 2025, up about 9% quarter-on-quarter from 1.6 million in the previous quarter, with typical finality in 3 to 5 seconds.
Average daily active sender addresses reached about 25,300, with 447,200 new addresses created in the quarter, bringing total addresses to roughly 6.9 million. Weekly payment counts are up roughly 430% versus 2023 levels. Payments remain the dominant use case.
“Payment” transactions accounted for about 55.7% of total activity in the third quarter of 2025, with daily payment counts around 989,600.
The RWA angle adds weight. XRPL's tokenized real-world asset market cap hit $347 million at the end of the third quarter, up 193% quarter-on-quarter, according to rwa.xyz data. The movement was driven by US Treasury funds like Ondo's OUSG, commercial paper, and real-estate tokens.
Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin launched in December 2024 on XRPL and Ethereum, and its total supply sits at $1.3 billion as of Dec. 19. Within XRPL specifically, RLUSD had a market cap of roughly $293 million, up by 41% in the past 30 days.
Ripple is now piloting RLUSD on L2s like Optimism and Base via Wormhole's NTT standard.
RLUSD is already a billion-plus-dollar asset with a material but still minority presence on XRPL, and XRPL's RWA footprint is now hundreds of millions rather than hobby-scale. Still, it remains tiny versus USDT and USDC on Ethereum and Solana.
Durable on-chain adoption means three things at once: payment transactions remaining the dominant type and growing in absolute terms, RWA capitalization and RLUSD usage on XRPL growing rather than migrating to Ethereum, and active addresses and new wallets expanding rather than spiking around price action and retracing.
Liquidity structure and institutional plumbing
Kaiko's crypto asset ranking for the third quarter places XRP tied with Ethereum in second place, with an AA score of 95 out of 100, earning full marks for liquidity, market depth, exchange availability, institutional adoption, and derivatives maturity, on par with Bitcoin

XRP's average daily trading volume was around $1.73 billion in early 2025, a roughly 22% year-over-year increase. XRP is treated by market makers more like a top-tier asset than a fringe alt, regardless of ETF headlines.
At the DEX and AMM layer on XRPL, average daily CLOB volume for fungible issued currencies was about $7.9 million in the third quarter, with around 1 million CLOB trades and roughly 7,800 daily CLOB traders. Additionally, average daily AMM volume was about $1.7 million.
Those numbers are small versus centralized venues but illustrate fragmented liquidity: deep off-chain order books and perps versus fairly modest on-ledger liquidity, even as the network becomes more composable with AMMs, oracles, and upcoming smart-contract extensions.
Adoption test
Assume ETF AUM stabilizes around $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. What would have to move over the next 12 to 24 months to call XRP's demand “durable” rather than ETF-driven?
First, ODL volumes and corridor coverage would need to keep growing from the $15 billion registered in 2024, and from the 70-plus corridor pairs.
That means total annual ODL volume stepping into the tens of billions and staying there, more than half of RippleNet clients opting into XRP rather than fiat-only rails, and corridor expansion with disclosed volumes rather than pilot language.
Second, XRPL's on-chain payments base of roughly 1.8 million daily transactions, 6.9 million addresses, and the majority of payment activity would need to continue rising rather than plateau.
A durable story has those curves sloping up even if price and ETF flows are flat: more payment transactions, more active addresses, more RWA issuance, and RLUSD volume on XRPL specifically, not just on Ethereum.
Third, liquidity quality would need to hold up. Kaiko's AA, 95/100 profile already has XRP's depth and derivative structure on par with Ethereum. The test in a stagnation scenario is whether order-book depth, bid-ask spreads, and open interest stay robust when ETF net flows normalize.
If they do, it suggests a base of market-maker and corridor-driven demand that isn't chasing ETF narratives.
Fourth, RLUSD and tokenized assets on XRPL would need to grow from a few hundred million in RWA market cap and about $88.8 million of RLUSD on XRPL into genuinely system-level collateral, rather than remaining a sidecar to the much larger Ethereum DeFi stack.
If those four things happen while ETF AUM is flat, XRP adoption is real: ETF products are just another access channel into an asset whose demand is anchored in cross-border flows, stablecoin rails, tokenized treasuries, and deep liquidity.
If ODL volumes stall, payment and address metrics roll over, RWA and RLUSD growth shift off-ledger, and liquidity scores slip once ETF inflows cool, the honest conclusion is that the 2025-26 XRP trade was mostly about ETFs, not structural demand. The plumbing will decide.
#Onchain #Ethereum $XRP #Billion
$ETH

When I first dove into Lorenzo Protocol, what really struck me wasn’t just the idea of bringing traditional finance strategies to blockchain it was how they reimagined those strategies in a way that feels less like copy-paste finance and more like evolution. With @Lorenzo Protocol focus on quantitative trading strategies instead of just tokenizing assets, the platform is positioning itself at the intersection of professional trading and decentralized finance and that’s a big deal in today’s market.

Quantitative trading has long been the domain of institutional hedge funds, where massive data sets and algorithmic models determine when to buy or sell. Most retail investors either get priced out or simply don’t have access to these tools. Lorenzo is turning that status quo on its head by packaging these models into #On-chain Traded Funds (OTFs) that anyone can hold, trade, and interact with directly on the blockchain. It’s like turning Wall Street formulas into liquid tokens you can actually use.

I am telling you why this is meaningful. Traditional asset managers spend untold resources building, backtesting, and executing strategies and for most people, the only way to benefit from that work has been through mutual funds or #ETFs that you can’t transact with in real time. Lorenzo takes this concept, strips away the opacity, and makes everything transparent on-chain. This means every strategy’s logic, execution, and outcomes are visible through smart contracts. No hidden black boxes, no manual reconciliation, no blind trust just rules baked into code.

Imagine you’re holding a token that represents exposure to a quantitative trading model optimized for volatile markets. Instead of guessing what the manager is doing, you can see how the strategy moves, how it reacts to BTC price shifts, and how it reallocates capital all in real time. That’s the kind of clarity traditional finance tried to sell you with PDF reports once a quarter. Lorenzo does it every block.

But here’s where it gets even more interesting right now: Lorenzo isn’t just talking about strategies the protocol is actively incorporating AI and blockchain technology to enhance its asset management capabilities. Recently, news surfaced about Lorenzo’s development of a platform they’re calling CeDeFAI, which blends AI with on-chain capital allocation and strategy execution. This means not just quant strategies, but AI-enhanced quant strategies adapting and optimizing yield in ways that feel more alive than static code alone.

To put it in everyday language, think of Lorenzo’s AI integration like having a data-driven co-pilot constantly analyzing market conditions and making adjustments to the strategy as the environment changes. In markets where price swings are the norm rather than the exception, that can create a performance edge and it’s not just theoretical anymore, it’s underway. This kind of direction puts Lorenzo on the cutting edge of decentralized asset management, where AI isn’t just a buzzword it’s an engine for smarter yield.

I am talk about a practical product example that illustrates this shift the USD1+ OTF. Originally launched as a testnet product on the BNB Chain, this fund blends real-world assets, centralized trading yield, and DeFi yield sources into one diversified vehicle. On paper, that sounds complex and it is but in practice, it means users can gain exposure to diversified returns that are not dependent on inflation-based mechanisms or token dilution. It’s yield generated through genuine market activity and asset performance.

And the protocol isn’t stopping there. According to recent developments shared on data feeds, Lorenzo is planning deeper integrations of regulated real-world assets (RWAs) into its USD1+ OTF suite, building on earlier collaborations to include tokenized treasuries and stablecoins. This step is significant especially for investors looking for yield without excessive speculative risk because regulated RWAs can anchor returns to economic fundamentals rather than pure market sentiment.

You might be thinking, That sounds great but what about the token itself? That’s where BANK, Lorenzo’s native token, comes into play. BANK isn’t just a governance token; it’s woven into how strategies are governed, incentivized, and evolved. Recently, the token received broader exchange support, including new spot markets and expanded trading options across trading pairs on major platforms. Listings like BANK/USDT and BANK/USDC on a major exchange have driven notable market movements including sharp price surges and increased liquidity even as volatility persists.

Of course price action alone doesn’t define utility but increased accessibility and liquidity help more people participate in Lorenzo’s ecosystem, whether they’re active traders or long-term holders. And holders who participate in governance mechanisms like vote-escrowed BANK (veBANK) can influence strategic direction, which adds a layer of community-driven evolution to the protocol’s roadmap.

So what does all of this mean for a crypto investor or an on-chain strategist? Here’s how I see it: Lorenzo Protocol is moving beyond simple yield farming or passive liquidity provision. It’s architecting a system that wraps sophisticated financial logic into governance-aligned, transparent, and programmable vehicles. In an era where markets are hyper-efficient and information travels fast, the ability to interact directly with strategy tokens brimming with logic and backed by AI gives users a level of agency that traditional markets have never offered.

Lorenzo isn’t just another DeFi yield project. It’s a glimpse at what professional-grade asset management could look like when built from the ground up for the blockchain. Transparent, rule-based, and open to anyone with a wallet. And isn’t that what decentralized finance was always about?
@Lorenzo Protocol
#lorenzoprotocol
$BANK