XRP price stuck below $1.5, but bullish signals are piling up

XRP is entering May with rising bullish sentiment and renewed trader activity following a series of April developments tied to retail adoption and institutional use cases.According to Santiment, XRP’s social sentiment has reached its second-highest level in two years, with the firm linking the surge in part to Rakuten’s recent integration of XRP into its ecosystem. XRP market sentiment chart. Source: SantimentThe rollout allows users of Rakuten Wallet to convert loyalty points into XRP and spend the asset across more than 5 million merchant locations through QR-based payments.Rakuten Pay’s user base of about 44 million accounts places XRP in front of one of Japan’s largest consumer networks, while more than 3 trillion loyalty points, valued at roughly $23 billion, can now flow into the asset through conversions within the app. RippleX described the rollout as one of the largest retail-facing deployments of XRP so far.Derivatives positioning and whale activity point to accumulationAccording to CryptoQuant analyst Arab Chain, XRP’s 30-day average funding rate on Binance has climbed to 0.0002, the highest level since early February, after remaining negative for months and dropping as low as -0.0007 during periods dominated by short positioning. Positive funding rates indicate that traders are increasingly opening long positions, suggesting a stronger appetite for upside exposure in derivatives markets.Meanwhile, wallets holding between 10 million and 100 million XRP accumulated 420 million tokens over an 11-day stretch, while addresses with at least 1 billion XRP added another 730 million, bringing total whale purchases to 1.15 billion XRP during the same period.Despite the increase in positioning, XRP has continued to trade below recent highs. Data from CoinGecko shows the token at $1.37, up 0.2% over 24 hours, with the price still nearly 10% below its April high of $1.51. Market capitalization stood near $84.42 billion, with about 62 billion tokens in circulation.This level has now turned into the next key resistance zone that the token must clear.According to Santiment, strong positive sentiment after adoption news does not usually lead to instant price breakouts, and any impact may appear later once the early excitement settles down.Institutional activity expands alongside retail adoptionA separate development on April 29 has added to XRP’s institutional narrative, with a $59 million RLUSD settlement processed on the XRP Ledger at a transaction fee of $0.000188. On-chain researcher Ripple Bull Winkle said the transaction demonstrates live production use of Ripple’s payment infrastructure for large-scale cross-border settlements.RLUSD was designed for enterprise use cases such as treasury operations and settlement flows, and is integrated into Ripple Payments alongside existing institutional clients, including BKK Forex and iSend. Comparable transactions on traditional SWIFT rails can carry fees between 0.5% and 1% of notional value and take two to three days to settle, placing the XRPL transaction in contrast with a near-instant and sub-penny cost profile.Regulatory developments have also added another layer. On April 27, NYSE Arca filed a proposal with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to include XRP among eligible assets for commodity-based trust shares under Rule 8.201-E, alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.The filing requires at least 85% of a trust’s holdings to meet qualifying criteria and places XRP within a framework already used for exchange-traded products.Meanwhile, demand for XRP ETFs has picked up, with data from SoSoValue showing nearly $90 million in inflows over the past three weeks, with no negative days recorded since April 10.Considering the combination of retail access through Rakuten, whale accumulation, and stronger derivatives positioning, XRP price could see a delayed move higher if demand continues beyond the initial sentiment phase.The post XRP price stuck below $1.5, but bullish signals are piling up appeared first on Invezz