XRP exploded 24% to $4.18 on Saturday, its highest level since 2018, after Ripple Labs announced a multiyear custody and on-chain payment settlement partnership with Bank of America covering 38 corridors across the Asia-Pacific, Europe and Middle East. The deal, valued at $2.4 billion in committed minimums over five years according to terms disclosed in a Ripple SEC filing, makes Bank of America the second top-five U.S. bank to integrate the XRP Ledger after JPMorgan's confidential 2024 announcement.
XRP's market capitalization swelled to $238 billion on the move, retaking the third spot in cryptocurrency rankings ahead of Solana for the first time in eight months. Trading volume reached $19.4 billion in the 24 hours following the announcement, briefly the highest of any digital asset after Bitcoin.
Spot ETF Approval Window Opens
The Securities and Exchange Commission's statutory deadline to rule on a spot XRP ETF filed by Bitwise falls May 22, with Franklin Templeton and Grayscale applications due to receive decisions in early June. Polymarket odds for spot XRP ETF approval before July jumped to 84% from 51% on the Bank of America news, reflecting the regulator's track record of clearing crypto products with established institutional integrations.
Bloomberg ETF analysts Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart raised their probability estimate to 90%, citing the SEC's Hester Peirce comments at last week's MIT crypto summit that "the case for an XRP ETF is materially identical to the case Bitcoin and Ether already cleared." JPMorgan estimated potential first-year inflows of $14 billion across all three products.