What Is XRP? The Token, Ripple and Escrow Explained

XRP is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, a public blockchain that has been running since June 2012. All 100 billion XRP were created at launch, no new coins are ever issued, and every transaction destroys a small fee. Ripple, the US company, is not XRP but its largest holder: it keeps 31.4 billion XRP in time-locked escrow accounts and another 4.1 billion in freely available wallets. On October 21, 2026, one XRP cost $1.38, giving a market capitalisation of $87.3 billion and fifth place among all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap.

The SEC's case against Ripple ended in August 2025, and spot XRP ETFs have traded in the United States since November 2025. This explainer covers how many XRP exist, who holds them, what the token is used for and which risks matter. The network's technology gets only a short summary here; the linked XRP Ledger explainer goes into the detail.

What is XRP: the key facts at a glance

• Fixed maximum supply: All 100 billion XRP were created in June 2012; there is no mining and no new issuance.
• Burned fees: By October 21, 2026, about 14.4 million XRP had been destroyed through transaction fees, leaving a total supply of 99.986 billion.
• Escrow: Ripple holds 31.4 billion XRP in escrow; 1 billion is unlocked on the first day of each month, under the current schedule until June 2029.
• Circulation and value: CoinMarketCap counts 63.13 billion XRP in circulation, worth $87.3 billion at $1.38 each (October 21, 2026).
• SEC case closed: On August 7, 2025, the SEC and Ripple withdrew their appeals; the $125 million civil penalty stands.
• US ETFs: Six US funds held a combined 1.17 billion XRP worth about $1.5 billion on October 20, 2026.

XRP by the numbers: key data for October 2026

Price, circulating supply and rank come from CoinMarketCap (October 21, 2026, 21:19 UTC); total supply, fee and reserve come from the XRP Ledger itself; escrow and account numbers come from the xrpscan explorer.

CoinMarketCap excludes further holdings besides the escrow from its circulating figure. That is why its number is lower than total supply minus escrow, which comes to 68.4 billion XRP.

Ripple, XRP and the XRP Ledger: who is who

The three names are constantly mixed up, partly because XRP was long called "Ripple" in everyday use. They refer to different things, and the difference decides who owns what.

The history of XRP: from RipplePay to the XRP Ledger

The name Ripple is older than XRP. Canadian developer Ryan Fugger launched RipplePay in 2004, a payment network that passed debts along chains of trust between acquaintances. It had no token of its own. In 2011, developers David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto started work on a system that confirms payments without mining. The XRP Ledger went live in June 2012, the company now called Ripple followed in September 2012, and according to the project history on xrpl.org the founders gave it 80 billion XRP. Fugger handed the name and the project to the new team in 2012.

He had nothing to do with the token itself. When a user raised it with him in 2016, Fugger replied on Twitter that his Ripple never had XRP and that it was not his idea:

XRP escrow: how Ripple releases its XRP every month

At the end of 2017, Ripple placed 55 billion XRP into 55 escrows on the XRP Ledger, accounts that can only be opened on a fixed date. Since then, 1 billion XRP has been unlocked on the first day of every month. Whatever Ripple does not need goes back into a new escrow that releases only after all existing ones, as the company explains in its escrow explainer. That is why the escrows are still running, even though the original 55 monthly tranches would have been used up by the summer of 2022.

The current schedule is public on the ledger. On October 21, 2026, 31.4 billion XRP sat in 98 escrow entries across eight Ripple accounts, spread over 32 release dates:

Our view: the escrow caps how many XRP Ripple can bring to market, but it does not prevent sales. In theory Ripple can use up to 1 billion XRP a month, worth about $1.38 billion at the October 21, 2026 price. There are also the 4.1 billion XRP already sitting unlocked in Ripple wallets. Movements in these accounts are visible on any XRP explorer, so holders can track them themselves.

Burned XRP: how fees reduce the XRP supply

Every transaction on the XRP Ledger pays a fee, by default 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP. Nobody receives it; the fee is destroyed. Under heavy load it rises temporarily so that mass spam becomes expensive. Since 2012, 14,412,554 XRP have disappeared this way; total supply stood at 99,985,587,446 XRP on October 21, 2026.

Analysis: the number sounds large but is small in proportion. It equals 0.014 percent of the original supply, and one billion transactions at the standard fee destroy just 10,000 XRP. The burn is therefore a weak argument for XRP becoming scarcer; its main job is to protect the network against abuse.

Who holds XRP? The distribution of XRP holdings

XRP is unevenly distributed, and the reason is no secret: Ripple received 80 percent of the supply at launch. Based on xrpscan's account labels, the company now holds about 35.5 billion XRP, just over a third of the total. The ten largest accounts hold 36.7 percent of all XRP and the hundred largest 65.6 percent, escrows included in both cases. Many of the big accounts, however, belong to exchanges that hold their customers' coins.

Account labels come from xrpscan, ETF holdings from the xrp-insights tracker and the Evernorth figure from the company's own disclosures. Some overlap is possible because funds and companies keep their XRP with custodians such as Coinbase. How the first listed XRP treasury company is structured is covered in our report on Evernorth's Nasdaq debut.

How centralised is XRP? The debate over Ripple's influence

For years XRP was seen as unusually centralised. In the early years, most validators on the default list, the Unique Node List (UNL) that most servers follow, were run by Ripple itself. In 2017 the company announced it would reduce that share step by step, as set out in a strategy post on xrpl.org. How heated the debate was at the time shows in a tweet from September 2018 that quotes a publication by the Bank for International Settlements:

The list looks different today. On October 21, 2026, 35 validators were on the default lists of the XRPL Foundation and Ripple, one of them under the ripple.com domain. The rest are run by universities, exchanges, developer firms and individuals. New rules for the network need the backing of 80 percent of trusted validators for two weeks. The criticism has shifted as a result: away from how the network is run and towards how the holdings are distributed and who maintains the default lists.

What XRP is used for: payments, Ripple Payments and RLUSD

XRP was built as a fast bridge currency. A payment is final after three to five seconds and costs a fraction of a cent. Banks and payment providers can use it to move money between two currencies without parking funds in both countries in advance. Ripple Payments, the company's payment service, is built on that idea. According to a Ripple statement dated December 12, 2025, it had processed more than $95 billion by then and reaches over 90 percent of the global foreign exchange market.

One point matters for investors: Ripple Payments does not settle every payment in XRP. Depending on the corridor, funds move through conventional currencies, stablecoins or XRP. Since December 2024 Ripple has had its own dollar stablecoin for this, Ripple USD (RLUSD), which runs on the XRP Ledger and on Ethereum. Its market capitalisation stood at about $2.35 billion on October 21, 2026 (CoinMarketCap). In December 2025, the US banking regulator OCC gave Ripple conditional approval for a national trust bank that is to manage the RLUSD reserves.

On the ledger itself, XRP is the base currency: every fee and every account reserve is paid in XRP, and the built-in exchange lets you swap XRP for other tokens issued on the ledger. How consensus, reserves and the destination tag work in detail is covered in our explainer on how the XRP Ledger works.

The SEC case against Ripple: timeline and outcome

The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple, chief executive Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen on December 22, 2020, alleging that Ripple had sold XRP as an unregistered security. The case has been closed since August 7, 2025, when both sides withdrew their appeals, as the SEC litigation release confirms.

Our view: for XRP as a token, the July 2023 ruling was the decisive moment, because it did not treat trading on exchanges as a securities transaction. It came from a district court, however, and does not bind other courts. There is still no US law that classifies crypto tokens in general; the CLARITY Act has not passed the Senate. In the EU, XRP falls under the MiCA crypto-asset regulation.

XRP ETFs in the US: six funds since 2025

The Canary XRP ETF (ticker XRPC) began trading on Nasdaq on November 13, 2025, as the first US spot ETF on XRP. The SEC cleared the way on September 17, 2025, when it approved generic listing standards for exchange-traded commodity and crypto products. On October 20, 2026, six US funds held a combined 1.17 billion XRP, with net assets of about $1.5 billion (market close, xrp-insights tracker).

Measured against total supply, the funds hold 1.2 percent of all XRP. Retail investors in Germany and the rest of the EU generally cannot buy these US funds because they do not meet EU requirements for funds sold to private investors. Which exchange-traded XRP products are available instead is explained in our guide XRP ETF, Solana ETF, Ethereum ETF: what you can actually buy in Germany.

Why the XRP price says little about its value

Many newcomers see XRP as "cheap" because a single coin costs little. The unit price only means something together with the supply. The calculation with the figures from October 21, 2026:

In the last case, circulating XRP would be worth roughly 1,890 times the entire crypto market of $2.83 trillion. The calculation is not a forecast; it simply shows that a low unit price across 63 billion coins is no bargain in itself. Views on where the price could go are collected in our XRP price prediction.

XRP risks: what to know before buying

• Supply from escrow: up to 1 billion XRP can be unlocked every month, and 4.1 billion XRP already sit unlocked in Ripple wallets.
• Concentration: the hundred largest accounts hold 65.6 percent of all XRP, even though many of them belong to exchanges.
• Dependence on Ripple: news about the company moves the price, although Ripple's business does not necessarily need XRP; RLUSD and conventional payment rails compete with the token.
• Legal position: the 2023 ruling applies only to the case against Ripple, and a US law for crypto tokens is still missing.
• Volatility: in the 30 days to October 21, 2026, XRP lost 9.3 percent of its value, according to CoinMarketCap.

Buying and storing XRP safely

Most large trading platforms list XRP. For investors in the EU, the first thing to check is a licence under the MiCA regulation; which providers have one is shown in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges. Fees and coin selection are compared in our crypto exchange comparison, and the buying process step by step is described in our guide to buying XRP.

If you hold XRP yourself, you need your own XRP Ledger account with at least 1 XRP in reserve, and a destination tag when depositing to an exchange. Devices that support XRP are listed in our hardware wallet comparison. On tax in Germany: gains from selling XRP are tax-free after a holding period of more than one year; before that, an exemption limit of 1,000 euros a year applies. This does not replace advice from a tax professional for your own situation.

XRP in autumn 2026: separating the token from the company

Our view: in 2026 XRP is an established token with the SEC case behind it, its own ETFs in the United States and a public schedule showing when Ripple can release how many XRP. The open question has shifted. It is no longer whether XRP may be traded, but whether use of the token in payments keeps pace with the growth of Ripple, which increasingly relies on stablecoins such as RLUSD as well. Buying XRP is a bet on demand for the token, not on Ripple's business success.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)