Ripple’s XRP has officially crossed chains — now live on Solana as a wrapped token, opening the door for traders and institutions to use XRP inside Solana’s DeFi ecosystem.
What happened
- Hex Trust, a regulated custody provider, is issuing a 1:1 backed wrapped XRP (wXRP). Authorized users deposit native XRP with Hex Trust, which then mints wXRP on Solana and on EVM-compatible chains (Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, HyperEVM).
- The program, first announced in December, went live on Solana in mid-April (Solana’s official account flagged the launch on April 17, 2026).
Why it matters
- Wrapping XRP lets it participate in DeFi and market-making on chains with far deeper ecosystems than the native XRP Ledger. Per DeFiLlama, Ethereum and Solana hold the first and second spots in DeFi TVL ($57.2B and $6.08B respectively), while XRP Ledger sits 41st with roughly $51.46M.
- That expands XRP’s utility beyond payments and settlement use cases native to XRP Ledger — enabling lending, AMMs, yield strategies, and liquidity provisioning on major DeFi rails.
Numbers to watch
- On Solana, more than 834,000 XRP (about $1.2M) has already been wrapped and activated as wXRP.
- On Ethereum, roughly 50 million wXRP (about $74.5M) has been minted. Nearly all of those tokens have remained in a single Ethereum wallet — likely linked to the issuer — since early November, and Etherscan shows fewer than 60 total transactions involving wXRP to date.
Access and custody
- Institutions can register with Hex Trust to gain early access to the service. Hex Trust handles regulated custody of the underlying XRP, supporting the 1:1 peg for wXRP.
- Hex Trust did not immediately comment to Decrypt when contacted about the launch.
Market reaction
- XRP traded up roughly 2% in the past 24 hours, around $1.49 at the time of reporting. It still sits about 59% below its July all-time high of $3.65.
Context
- Ripple X SVP Marcus Infanger framed the move as a response to “growing demand to use XRP across the wider crypto ecosystem,” and the wrapped token’s arrival on Solana is the first concrete step toward that cross-chain accessibility.
Bottom line
- Wrapping XRP onto Solana (and EVM chains) gives XRP holders new ways to deploy capital into DeFi and for market makers to access liquidity across ecosystems. Adoption and on-chain activity will determine whether wXRP becomes a major liquidity route — for now, the supply sits concentrated and on-chain usage is limited, but the infrastructure to expand XRP’s reach is in place.
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