As many investors learned in 2025, the imposition of tariffs, which are simply taxes on the end-consumers of imported goods, can knock markets around long before they actually change what companies earn from sales or what households buy. It's much the same with the way they affect investor psychology, which is to say that tariffs can take up a lot of headspace without necessarily changing the amount of capital available for investment.
The disconnect between headlines and fundamentals is why President Trump's tariffs have so far looked like a minor drag on XRP (XRP 1.07%) despite changing nothing about the financial problems the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is built to solve. The coin is down by 7% since the first imposition of tariffs in early April 2025. But are the tariffs actually the force responsible for that minor decline, and is there a situation in which they might actually ultimately make the investment thesis for buying XRP even stronger?
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This coin is mostly along for the ride
First, it's important to note that the period immediately after the new tariffs were imposed wasn't a great time for XRP -- nor for most assets on the market. Take a look at this chart:
As you can see, after the immediate shock of the tariffs wore off, XRP recovered quite well, and then went on to absolutely fly when a long-running Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against Ripple, the coin's issuer, was dropped in August. Nonetheless, it's well known that broad tariffs tend to reduce a country's long-run economic output, and depress wages. So could that explain why XRP has been mostly losing value since the highs after the lawsuit was dropped?
Probably not.
XRP generally moves in line with other major cryptoassets, which as a group are highly sensitive to broader macro conditions. That makes tariffs relevant mainly as one more catalyst that can dent sentiment and push investors away from volatile assets rather than something tangibly pushing down XRP's value directly for economic reasons.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
Could the future be different?
Looking forward, there's a couple of ways that this story might change over the next 12 months.
If tariffs escalate into a genuine growth scare with real economic harms, which they do currently appear to be causing at a moderate pace, XRP will probably face downward pressure, along with other risk assets, at least in the short run. Put differently, bad economic news is bad news for crypto, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
On the other hand, if the tariffs continue to be used largely as negotiating tools, with many of their actual economic impacts deferred or mitigated by the carving out of many exceptions, XRP will probably not suffer much longer. While it's true that the constant tariff headlines keep investors skittish and less likely to commit to riskier investments, including XRP, the odds are fair that eventually the market will adapt to the new and chaotic environment, which would then become a green light for this coin.
