XRP beat bitcoin gains as CLARITY Act advanced, but a real bullrun still needs Congress

$XRP traders got the regulatory headline they had been waiting for on Thursday after the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in a 15-9 vote, moving one of Washington’s main crypto market-structure bills closer to a full Senate fight.

$XRP traded zoomed above $1.5 after the vote, adding 5% over a 24-hour period and 7.6% on the week, making it one of the stronger performers among major tokens such as bitcoin and ether, which have added under 3% for the week.

The outsized reaction came as few large crypto assets have been shaped as directly by U.S. regulatory uncertainty as $XRP.

The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, setting off years of exchange suspensions, institutional hesitation and legal noise around whether $XRP could trade freely in U.S. markets. A 2023 ruling from Judge Analisa Torres helped clear secondary-market $XRP trading from being treated as securities transactions, but the broader market never got what large allocators usually want - federal legislation that is harder for a future regulator to reinterpret.

The CLARITY bill would put more digital assets under a defined market-structure regime and give institutions a cleaner framework for custody, trading, market making and ETF allocation.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse called the committee vote “the moment” in a post on X, saying the industry deserves “the same rules and protections as every other asset class.”

The Senate Banking version still has to merge with the Agriculture Committee version, pass the full Senate, survive House reconciliation and reach the president’s desk. Senator Cynthia Lummis has said lawmakers have agreement on most of the bill, while Senator Elizabeth Warren has objected to parts of the process. The Memorial Day recess gives the current push a practical deadline.

Optimism and demand for $XRP stems from several fundamental factors directly impacted both the token and its closely-related firm Ripple.

Alexis Sirkia, an early Ripple and Ethereum market maker who now leads decentralized clearing firm Yellow Network told CoinDes that the "the real story of $XRP in mid-2026 will not be its consolidating price, but the quiet, almost imperceptible rewiring of global finance."

"With legal clouds lifted and institutional capital proving remarkably sticky, the $XRP Ledger is transforming into a compliance-grade tokenization and settlement layer, speaking the precise language that institutional capital does," Sirkia added.

The $XRP Ledger, the underlying network of xrp tokens, has recorded a bump in activity in the past few months. Tokenized real-world assets on the chain have crossed $3 billion, placing it among the leading non-Ethereum networks for institutional tokenization.

Last week's Ripple-JPMorgan-Mastercard-Ondo pilot processed a tokenized U.S. Treasury redemption in under five seconds, demonstrating the chain can bridge public blockchain rails with traditional interbank settlement.

Meanwhile, the broader DeFi ecosystem built around $XRP through bridged representations has grown to over $560 million in combined value locked, led by Flare and Doppler Finance.

U.S.-listed spot $XRP ETFs drew $25.8 million in net inflows earlier this week in their largest daily haul since early January, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.35 billion.

The inflows followed Ripple’s closing of a $200 million debt facility for its Ripple Prime brokerage and a successful pilot tokenized U.S. Treasury settlement on the $XRP Ledger with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo Finance.

As such, $XRP remains well below its 2025 highs, and the $1.50 area continues to act as the level bulls need to reclaim.

The committee vote gave $XRP a catalyst. Full legal clarity is still the trade.