XRP is trading near $1.40 on Sunday, holding a range it has defended for three weeks while investors wait for Tuesday’s Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, the bill that would finally settle how the token is classified under US law. The token closed the week at $1.3480, about 20 percent below its August high, but the flows behind it tell a more interesting story than the price does.
US spot XRP ETFs have attracted roughly $32 million in inflows so far this September, according to data cited by Benzinga, bringing cumulative inflows to about $1.7 billion. The funds, led by the Bitwise XRP ETF, hold more than $1.45 billion in assets. Last week XRP ETFs posted a 2026 weekly record of $60.5 million in inflows, per Ainvest. Money keeps arriving even though price refuses to break out, which is the kind of divergence that usually gets resolved one way or another.
The flat price is not for lack of trying. XRP briefly pushed toward $1.45 during the week before sellers took it back down, and the token has now spent 21 trading days inside a range that spans roughly 10 percent. Derivatives data shows deleveraging rather than accumulation of new risk, meaning the ETF buyers and the leverage traders are not pulling in the same direction.
RLUSD hits a record
Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin reached a record $2.44 billion in circulating supply this week, per UseTheBitcoin. The growth matters for two reasons. It gives Ripple a growing payments business that does not depend on XRP price action, and it puts Ripple directly in the path of the stablecoin yield dispute that has been the hardest part of the CLARITY Act negotiations.
Democrats have pushed to restrict interest or rewards on stablecoin balances, arguing yield-bearing stablecoins act like deposits and should face bank rules. Republicans and most of the industry counter that prohibiting yield would simply push the product offshore, where US regulators have no reach. The final Senate draft includes a time-limited reward mechanism as a compromise, allowing some form of rewards under defined conditions rather than an outright ban or an open license. How that provision survives the floor process and later negotiations with the House is an open question, and Ripple’s growing stake in the answer explains why the company has lobbied so hard on the bill.
The stablecoin market around XRP is also getting more crowded. MoneyGram, which partnered with Ripple on cross-border payments for years, launched its own MGUSD stablecoin and a stablecoin-backed Visa card this month, built on Stellar rather than the XRP Ledger. Ripple’s Justine Van Buren has been making the case publicly that MoneyGram’s near 500,000 cash locations matter more as money moves on-chain, but the relationship is no longer exclusive. Competition in the remittance corridor that XRP was built for is intensifying from both directions.
What Tuesday decides
The Senate votes on cloture at 2:15 p.m. ET Tuesday, which requires 60 votes to begin formal consideration of the bill. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats or independents must join. The final draft released Sunday night includes ethics language the White House approved, requiring senior officials to divest crypto-linked interests or place them in blind trusts, plus new enforcement powers for state attorneys general. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has scheduled the vote knowing he does not yet have the votes in hand.
For XRP specifically, the bill’s core change is classification. Moving most digital commodities under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would resolve the legal ambiguity that has hung over XRP since the SEC sued Ripple in 2020. That case ended in 2024 with a mixed ruling that treated programmatic sales differently from institutional ones, but the underlying question of which agency governs the token in a market-structure regime has stayed open ever since. A CLARITY Act that passes would answer it. One that fails on Tuesday would probably leave it unanswered until 2027, with a new Congress and possibly different leadership at both regulators.
The bill would also settle how XRP ETFs are treated going forward. The existing funds were approved under commodity assumptions, and a law confirming that classification would remove the legal risk that has kept some large allocators on the sidelines. That is why the ETF flow numbers are being watched as a leading indicator: the buyers arriving now are positioning ahead of a legislative outcome, not reacting to one.
The technical picture
Traders are watching two levels. Resistance sits near $1.40 to $1.50, the zone the token has failed to clear despite steady ETF demand. Support sits near $1.32, the low of the recent range. Invezz noted that XRP fell 2.2 percent to $1.35 last week as rising US rate expectations pressured crypto broadly, a reminder that the token’s biggest near-term risk may be macro rather than legislative.
The Federal Reserve meets September 15 and 16, the same days as the Senate vote, with markets pricing a strong chance of a hawkish outcome that pressures risk assets. Bitcoin has already given back most of its September gains and sits near $77,000, down about 4.5 percent over the past week. XRP could clear its legislative overhang and still get sold off if the Fed surprises. Timing, as always, is doing nobody any favors.
Galaxy Research cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law this year to 10 percent in August, while Polymarket traders put passage odds near 30 percent after the revised drafts surfaced. The gap between those numbers is the gap between the bill’s full path through Congress and the immediate vote. Tuesday answers only the second question, but it shapes the first. If cloture clears, the Senate would still need to pass the bill and reconcile it with the House version, and the stablecoin yield fight would resume in conference. If cloture fails, the calendar does the rest.
For now, the flows keep coming and the price keeps waiting. Seven unnamed senators will decide which one has been right.