Big Banks Are Quietly Stacking XRP While Exchange Supply Dries Up
Intesa Sanpaolo and Wall Street firms disclosed XRP exposure as exchange reserves hit multi-year lows — here's what it means for holders.
Fewer XRP coins are sitting on exchanges than at almost any point in the past several years, and regulatory filings show some of the biggest names in traditional finance have been adding exposure to the token. If you hold XRP, this combination of shrinking exchange supply and growing institutional interest is worth understanding — even if it doesn’t guarantee anything about where the price goes next.
A major Italian bank shows its hand
Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank, disclosed in a recent SEC Form 13F filing that it owns 712,000 shares of the Grayscale XRP Trust, an investment currently worth around $18 million. That XRP stake sits inside a broader $235 million crypto portfolio at the bank, making up roughly 6% to 7% of its total digital asset holdings.
Intesa isn’t alone. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Millennium, and Citadel have all reported some form of XRP exposure through exchange-traded products, according to the disclosures. The pattern here matters for everyday holders: big institutions are choosing to buy XRP wrapped inside an ETF rather than holding the token directly on a wallet or exchange, mainly because it simplifies custody, accounting, and regulatory paperwork on their end.
That’s a very different approach from how most retail holders interact with XRP, but it signals something useful: serious money is finding ways to get exposure to this token through regulated, familiar channels.
Exchange supply is drying up fast
On-chain data from Glassnode shows XRP reserves held across the top 10 crypto exchanges have dropped from around 4 billion tokens down to roughly 1.6 to 1.7 billion. Withdrawals off exchanges have also hit a five-year high, meaning more people are moving their XRP into private wallets rather than leaving it parked on trading platforms.
For holders, this trend is generally read as a sign of confidence — coins moving to private storage typically means owners intend to hold rather than sell in the near term. Less supply readily available for sale on exchanges can also make prices more sensitive to sudden bursts of buying or selling, since there’s a thinner cushion of coins sitting on order books.
On the ETF side, U.S. spot XRP funds pulled in nearly $6 million in net inflows on July 30, with Bitwise and Franklin Templeton leading that day’s activity. Total assets held by U.S. spot XRP ETFs are now approaching $1 billion, with cumulative inflows since launch reaching around $1.5 billion.
South Korea and CME keep building the plumbing
South Korea remains one of the most active XRP markets in the world, with trading volume on Korean exchanges recently running at close to four times that of Bitcoin. Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, is now live on the country’s four biggest platforms — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit — giving it a foothold in one of crypto’s largest retail trading markets.
Meanwhile, CME Group continues to expand its XRP derivatives offering, which already includes futures and options contracts. That puts XRP alongside traditional asset classes like commodities, foreign exchange, and equities on one of the world’s most established derivatives exchanges — a sign of maturing institutional infrastructure, even if it doesn’t directly translate into short-term price moves.
What it actually means for holders
None of this guarantees a price rally, and readers should be cautious about treating institutional filings or falling exchange balances as a promise of gains. But taken together, these data points point to a token that’s increasingly plumbed into the traditional financial system — through bank balance sheets, regulated ETFs, and major derivatives exchanges — rather than one confined to retail trading apps.
For long-term XRP holders, that shift in who’s paying attention, and how they’re accessing it, is arguably more significant than any single day’s price swing.
Read more: Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP Sit at a Fork in the Road — What August Means for Your Holdings
