XRP: Whale Wallets Add 1.38B Tokens vs 250M Retail Buy as Price Holds Above $1
Retail addresses hit an ATH of 1.12M even as XRP fell 70% from its peak, but whale accumulation outpaces retail 5-to-1 on net supply added.
XRP addresses holding between 1,000 and 100,000 tokens reached a record 1,120,198 wallets, per Santiment on-chain data, a milestone that sits awkwardly alongside a near-40% price decline in 2026. The token itself printed a year-to-date low of $1.10, putting it roughly 70% below its $3.66 all-time high. Wallet count and price are moving in opposite directions, and the flow data underneath explains why.
Net supply added tells a different story than address count
Splitting the retail cohort: wallets holding 1,000-10,000 XRP now total 819,690, while the 10,000-100,000 XRP bracket sits at 305,080. Combined balances for this 1,000-100,000 XRP group started 2026 at 10.48 billion tokens and now stand at 10.73 billion — net accumulation of roughly 250 million XRP year-to-date, driven by cheaper entry prices during the drawdown.
Wallets in the 1 million to 100 million XRP range — a much smaller address count but far larger individual balances — added 1.38 billion tokens over the same window. That’s more than five times the net token accumulation of the retail bracket, despite retail’s advantage in absolute wallet growth. For positioning purposes, whales remain the larger marginal buyer at current levels even as retail participation broadens.
February crash barely dented the wallet growth trend
The retail cohort peaked at 1,095,830 combined addresses on February 6 before a market-wide selloff — XRP dropped 19.7% intraday — pulled the count down to 1,088,450 by February 10, a loss of about 7,380 wallets in four days. XRP bottomed at $1.11 on February 11, then rallied 21.07% off that low.
Recovery in wallet count took close to two weeks to clear the pre-crash level. Since the February 6 trough, the network has added more than 36,000 retail-sized wallets, and that growth curve has held through the broader downtrend rather than reversing — a signal that new entrants kept opening positions rather than exiting during the drop.
What the split implies for the current base
Rising wallet counts confirm broadening participation across the retail tier, but the concentration of net new supply in the 1M-100M XRP bracket means whale-sized holders are still setting the marginal bid. That combination — retail wallets expanding on address count, whales dominating on token volume — is what Santiment’s data frames as the mechanism keeping XRP anchored above $1 through the current leg down.
Read more: XRP’s Third Accumulation Zone: Analyst Maps $0.70-$1.10 Base Against Prior 1,803% Runs