How XRP supply works: creation, escrow and destruction

All 100 billion XRP were created in one act when the XRP Ledger was established across 2011 and early 2012. Nothing has been issued since, and the protocol has no way to issue more. Of that original total, 80 billion went to the company now called Ripple and 20 billion stayed with the founders. What has changed since is where the XRP sits and how much of it still exists.

This guide covers the mechanism only.

Where the 100 billion came from

XRP was not mined into existence. Most well-known crypto assets pay new units to whoever processes transactions, so their total grows over time toward a cap. The XRP Ledger skipped that step. The full amount was created when the ledger was established, and the ledger's own documentation describes the supply as fixed from that point.

The unit under the surface is the drop. One XRP is one million drops, so 100 billion XRP is 100 quadrillion drops, an amount chosen to sit inside a 64-bit integer. Every balance and every transaction cost on the ledger is counted in drops, which is why fees can be quoted in fractions far smaller than one XRP.

How much XRP does Ripple hold?

The 80 billion figure above describes 2012. Two things have moved it since: sales and distributions out of the company's own accounts, and the 55 billion placed under escrow in 2017.

The current split between escrowed and unescrowed amounts is visible to anyone, because XRP Ledger accounts and escrow objects are public records. Any figure you read for company holdings is a reading of those public accounts at a moment in time, so check the date attached to it.

What XRP escrow is, in ledger terms

Escrow on the XRP Ledger is a protocol feature, not a company arrangement. An account creates an escrow object, moves XRP into it, and sets a condition. The most common condition is a time: the XRP cannot be released before it. Until then, the amount is recorded on the ledger, visible to everyone, and unspendable by anyone including the account that created it.

Ripple used that feature in 2017 to place 55 billion XRP into a queue of escrows that open in sequence rather than at once. The ledger documentation describes the purpose plainly: the schedule governs how much can reach general supply in any month, and it is published rather than discretionary.

Two details matter more than the headline number:

• Release does not mean sale. An escrow that reaches its release time makes XRP spendable by the account that owns it. Whether the XRP then moves anywhere is a separate action recorded separately.
• Unused amounts can go back in. XRP released from escrow and not used has been returned to new escrows at the back of the queue, which is why the escrowed total falls more slowly than a simple division of the schedule suggests.

Every transaction destroys a little XRP

Here is the part most coverage of XRP supply leaves out. When a transaction is processed on the XRP Ledger, its transaction cost is deducted from the sender and then destroyed. The ledger's own reserves documentation states it directly: during transaction processing, the transaction cost destroys some of the sending address's XRP balance.

No validator receives that XRP. No company receives it. It stops existing, and the ledger's record of total supply is smaller afterwards by exactly that amount. People often call this burning, though the ledger simply records a smaller total.

The design reason is spam. On a network that pays fees to block producers, a fee is a transfer of value between users and processors. On the XRP Ledger, a fee is a cost with no recipient, so flooding the network cannot be profitable for anyone, including the flooder. The reference cost for a standard transaction is 10 drops, which is 0.00001 XRP. It rises automatically when the network is busy and falls again when load drops.

Because there is no issuance to offset it, the arithmetic runs one way only. Total supply moves down with use, in very small steps, and the protocol contains nothing that moves it up.

Reserves: the XRP an account must keep

Reserves are a second place XRP sits without circulating, and they work differently from escrow.

Every account on the XRP Ledger must hold a minimum XRP balance, called the base reserve. Every object that account owns on the ledger, such as a trust line or an offer, adds an owner reserve on top. The purpose is stated in the documentation as protecting the shared ledger from growing excessively large through spam or malicious use, since each account and object consumes space that every server has to store.

The amounts are set by validator vote rather than fixed in the protocol, and they have been lowered before. Reserved XRP is not frozen: the documentation notes that the XRP reserve is not dormant, and that reserves can be used to pay transaction costs. Closing an account releases most of its base reserve, minus the cost of the closing transaction, which is destroyed like any other.

Total supply and circulating supply are different numbers

For a mined asset, the distinction is mild. For XRP it decides whether a statement is right or wrong, because the two figures move for different reasons and sometimes in different directions.

An escrow release changes the second figure and leaves the first untouched, because the XRP already existed. A transaction cost changes both, because the XRP is gone. So a sentence such as "escrow releases add to XRP supply" is true only of circulating supply, and never of the total.

Two mechanisms, running at the same time

Set side by side, the picture is unusual among large crypto assets. One mechanism moves XRP out of escrow into general circulation on a schedule set in 2017. A separate mechanism removes XRP from existence every time anybody uses the ledger, at a rate set by how busy the network is. Both are protocol behaviour, recorded transaction by transaction on a public ledger.

Understanding which figure a claim refers to is most of the work. When you read that XRP supply is rising, that is escrow and circulating supply. When you read that XRP supply is falling, that is destruction and total supply. Both statements describe the same asset on the same day.

Where to look next

• XRP price in Australian dollars - the live figure, struck and sourced.
• Crypto prices in AUD - the other coins tracked here.
• Glossary - plain definitions of the market terms used across the site.
• Guides - the rest of the explainer library.

Sources

• What is XRP and Why Is It Valuable? - the 100 billion created at ledger establishment, the 80/20 allocation in 2012, and the 55 billion placed in escrow in 2017.
• Reserves - XRP Ledger documentation - the transaction cost destroying part of the sending balance, the purpose of the base and owner reserves, and reserves being usable for transaction costs.
• Transaction cost - XRP Ledger documentation - the reference cost in drops, the load-based increase, and destruction rather than payment.
• Escrow - XRP Ledger documentation - how time-held escrow objects work on-ledger.
• Fee voting - XRP Ledger documentation - how validators set the reserve and cost parameters.
• An Explanation of Ripple's XRP Escrow, XRP Ledger, December 2017 - the escrow queue, the monthly release schedule, and unused amounts returning to new escrows.
• Your Questions About XRP, Answered - that no more than the original 100 billion can ever be created.
• Currency formats - drops, and the 64-bit representation of balances.
• Deleting accounts - what an account recovers when it is closed.
• Lower Reserves Are In Effect, XRP Ledger, December 2024 - the reserve amounts being lowered by validator vote.

General information about how the XRP Ledger works, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset, and not a statement about where any price is heading. Tradergy keeps no account and collects no personal data. Reviewed by the Tradergy editorial team, September 2026.