- Five US spot XRP funds held coins with a fair value of $947.3m at 30 June against an accounting cost of $1.693bn, a gap of $746.1m.
- Investors still put in more than they pulled out over the first half: $629.9m of share creations against $309.1m of redemptions.
- The figures are one quarter-end snapshot of five funds’ books, and say nothing about where any individual holder stands today.
Two numbers from the same set of filings appear to say opposite things. Five of the largest US spot XRP funds were carrying their coins at $746.1m below what they paid for them at the end of June. Money kept arriving anyway.
The daily inflow figures that dominate ETF coverage tell you money is arriving. They don’t tell you whether anybody is making any. At the end of June the average dollar that had gone into these five funds was worth less than when it went in, and the funds were still taking in more than they were paying out. Both of those were true at the same time, which is worth knowing before you read the next headline about a streak.
What the filings say
The five funds are run by Bitwise, Canary Capital, Franklin Templeton, 21Shares and Grayscale. Between them, according to CryptoSlate’s reading of their SEC filings, they recorded roughly $629.9m of primary-market share creations in the first half of the year against $309.1m of redemptions. Net capital activity came out positive by about $320.8m.
Over the same period, the XRP those funds held was valued at $947.3m as of 30 June, against the nearly $1.693bn of accounting cost sitting on their books. That is 44.1% below what was paid.
A note on sourcing before going further. We have not read the filings themselves, and no primary document was available to us at the time of writing. Everything above comes from one secondary report, and the figures should be treated as that outlet’s arithmetic on documents we have not independently checked.
Cost, fair value, and why the gap isn’t a loss
These are two different measurements and they get conflated constantly.
Accounting cost is what a fund paid, in total, for the coins it currently holds. Every time new money comes in, the fund buys more XRP at whatever the price is that day, and that purchase price gets added to the pile. Fair value is what those same coins were worth on the day the accounts were drawn up.
When fair value sits below cost, the difference is unrealised. Nothing has been sold and nothing has been crystallised. It is a statement about the fund’s books at one moment, not a bill anyone has been handed. It also isn’t your position: an investor who bought in during a dip could be perfectly fine while the fund as a whole shows a large paper gap, and the reverse holds too.
Inflows and price are not the same signal
CoinDesk and Cointelegraph have both reported XRP funds logging a run of consecutive positive sessions, ten in a row at the latest count, alongside similar streaks for ether and Solana products. Read next to a $746m gap, that looks contradictory. It isn’t.
An inflow streak means creations exceeded redemptions on each of those days. There is real buying behind it, because the fund has to go out and acquire XRP to back the new shares. What it does not mean is that the price went up, or that existing holders are ahead. We covered how these flow numbers work, and how easily the same data supports opposite stories depending on the window chosen, in our markets coverage.
One inference of ours, labelled as such: money arriving while the price is low pulls the average cost per coin down, so the percentage gap can narrow through fresh buying alone, without the price moving at all. That is arithmetic rather than a forecast, and the direction of travel will only be visible in the next set of filings.
Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart described XRP ETF demand as “surprisingly resilient” in a post on 31 August, putting cumulative net inflows across the asset class at $1.8bn. That is a wider measure across more funds and a longer period than the five-fund half-year figures, which is part of why the numbers floating around this story don’t reconcile neatly.
What the filings can’t tell you
Quite a lot, as it happens. The cost basis is measured at a June quarter end, which is months old by now and reflects purchases made across a period when XRP traded at very different levels. It covers five funds rather than the whole category. And it describes the funds’ aggregate books, so it says nothing about any individual investor’s position, including yours.
For UK readers there is a further remove: US-listed spot ETFs generally aren’t available through ordinary UK brokers, because they don’t publish the disclosure documents UK rules require. The relevance here is as a read on demand for XRP itself, not as a product most people reading this could buy.
What to watch
The next round of filings. Half-year accounts gave us this snapshot; the following set will show whether the gap narrowed, and whether it narrowed because the price recovered or because cheaper buying dragged the average cost down. Those are different stories with the same headline number.
Also worth watching is whether creations hold up now that the underwater position is public. Sustained buying into a fund whose books show a 44% gap would say something about who is buying and how long they intend to sit there. A month or two of redemptions would say the opposite.