Excited About These 3 Catalysts for XRP in September? Don't Be.

XRP's (CRYPTO: XRP) enthusiastic holder community, active as ever, is showing signs of excitement about three potential catalysts for the coin and its ledger, all of which land in September.

But holders should probably not get their hopes up for any of the three, as they are more likely to turn out to be negative catalysts than positive ones. Let's break down each one and see why bearish outcomes are probably on the way.

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Removing this potential bottleneck for traffic might actually be harmful

Upgrades to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) are usually bullish for XRP's price, and they are almost certainly going to continue to be, at least in the big picture. But not every upgrade is guaranteed to create the conditions for more value to flow through to the coin's holders.

The ledger's validators are presently voting on an amendment called BatchV1_1, which creates a feature for app developers to bundle as many as eight different transactions into one unit for more efficient reporting back to the chain. In principle, boosting the efficiency and thus the throughput of the XRPL is favorable, as it would make financial institutions less concerned about its infrastructure being able to handle the scale of the traffic they would create.

One issue is that the XRPL is carrying nowhere near its throughput capacity today.

Throughput on the mainnet runs between 100 and 230 transactions per second (TPS) at its daily peaks, though it can accommodate upward of 1,500 TPS as demonstrated in testing. What's more, Ethereum shipped the equivalent feature in May 2025 as one of several upgrades that expanded its capacity, and between then and Sept. 10, its transaction fees per day fell by 35% even as its transactions per day rose by 53%.

So allowing for transactions to be handled more efficiently could end up decreasing the already paltry fee intake on the XRPL; for all of August, it only brought in $11,693, according to data from DefiLlama. That makes this upgrade far from a slam dunk for being a bullish catalyst.

The Fed could be on the verge of doing a rate hike, not a cut

Some investors believe that the Federal Reserve is going to vote to cut rates or hold them steady at its next meeting, on Sept. 15 and 16. A rate cut would inject liquidity into the financial system by reducing borrowing costs, which tends to benefit crypto, in particular XRP. A hike would have the opposite effect, and a pause would probably be received by the market nearly as enthusiastically as a cut.

Despite what some might be hoping for, the base case here is a hike. A hold would be the dovish surprise. CME's FedWatch indicates that the odds of a hike are at 70% as of Sept. 10.

Thus, it's likely that investors who are expecting a cut are working with a combination of older information and perhaps a slight desire to see what they want to see. Once again, this "positive catalyst" is probably going to turn out as the opposite.

The Clarity Act vote is unlikely to succeed

The crypto market structure bill, the Clarity Act, is another much-awaited event. It's true that if the bill were passed as it's currently conceived, there would be some bullish implications for XRP because there would be far fewer legal and regulatory compliance barriers to financial institutions onboarding their capital to the network.

The Senate votes on cloture for the Clarity Act on Sept. 15; advancing it will require 60 senators, and there do not appear to be that many who are willing to vote for it. Seven Democratic senators have said the current draft falls short on ethics guardrails, consumer protection, and reducing illicit activity.

Even if the cloture vote succeeds, the window for the two chambers to finish the job is very narrow. House Republican leadership cut the last two weeks of September from the voting calendar, so the House leaves Washington on Sept. 17, two days after the Senate's first vote. Any bill the Senate amends has to go back to the House for another vote, which pushes a vote on final passage past the midterm elections.

As of the time of this writing, prediction markets give the bill just a 15% chance of passing.

XRP's price will almost certainly be fine within a few weeks if the Clarity Act doesn't get voted on, or if it gets voted down in its current form. Still, this isn't the bullish catalyst that investors want it to be.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.