How many XRP are there? There are exactly 100 billion — every one created in 2012, with no way to ever make more. More than 60 billion of those circulate today. The rest sits locked in on-ledgerHow many XRP are there? There are exactly 100 billion — every one created in 2012, with no way to ever make more. More than 60 billion of those circulate today. The rest sits locked in on-ledger

Learn/Cryptocurrency Knowledge/Hot Concepts/How Many XRP Are There? Max Supply, Total Supply, Circulating Supply

How Many XRP Are There? Max Supply, Total Supply, Circulating Supply

Author: Emma Williams

Sep 21, 2026Emma Williams

10 min

How many XRP are there?

There are exactly 100 billion — every one created in 2012, with no way to ever make more. More than 60 billion of those circulate today.

The rest sits locked in on-ledger escrow contracts Ripple set up in 2017, releasing on a fixed monthly schedule.

Key Takeaways

XRP's maximum supply is 100 billion, all created in 2012 — no mining, no minting, and no vote can raise it.
The XRP Ledger's founders gifted 80 billion XRP to Ripple, which locked 55 billion of it into on-ledger escrow contracts in 2017.
Escrow releases up to 1 billion XRP each month, but Ripple's own filings show the balance falling by only about 900 million per quarter — roughly 300 million a month.
Circulating supply is not read off the ledger — it's an estimate, and CoinMarketCap's methodology excludes team, foundation, treasury and escrow holdings by its own discretion.
Every transaction destroys at least 10 drops (0.00001 XRP), which adds up to about 14 million XRP burned in fourteen years — 0.014% of the supply.
Supply is not depth: more than 60 billion XRP counts as circulating, but only a thin slice sits on an order book, and that slice is what your trade actually meets.

How Many XRP Are There? Three Numbers, Three Answers

There are exactly 100 billion XRP, and there will never be more.

Every token was created at once when the XRP Ledger launched in 2012. There is no mining. There is no minting function. No developer vote and no governance proposal can raise the cap — it is written into the protocol itself.

So why do you keep seeing one number on a data site, a different one on a block explorer, and 100 billion everywhere else in different places? Because those are three different measurements wearing similar names.

	XRP	Bitcoin	Ethereum
Max supply	100,000,000,000	21,000,000	None
How it was created	All at once, in 2012	Mined gradually until ~2140	Ongoing issuance
Which way supply moves	Falls — every fee is burned	Rises until the cap	Both — issuance vs burns

XRP is the one that started finished.

Where the Rest of the XRP Sits

The 80 Billion Gift, and the 55 Billion Lock

Here's the part that usually gets skipped: the XRP Ledger's founders gifted 80 billion XRP to Ripple. Not sold. Gifted, at launch, in 2012. Eighty percent of every XRP that will ever exist went to one company on day one.

That created an obvious problem. If Ripple could sell 80 billion tokens whenever it liked, nobody could price XRP with any confidence, because the supply overhang would be unknowable.

Ripple's answer, in 2017, was to lock 55 billion XRP — 55% of the total possible supply — into a series of escrow contracts on the ledger itself. Not a promise, not a corporate policy. The XRP Ledger's own transaction rules control the release, and the consensus protocol enforces them.

It's a genuinely unusual arrangement, and it's the reason XRP's supply schedule is more predictable than most.

What Ripple Still Holds Outright

Escrow isn't everything Ripple has. The company also holds XRP directly, in ordinary wallets it can move at any time.

For eight years Ripple published exactly how much, every quarter, in a document called the XRP Markets Report. In May 2025 it stopped. The last one covered Q1 2025, and Ripple said plainly why: the report "has not had the intended effect," and its transparency had been "used against the company — most notably by former SEC leadership."

That final report is now the most recent official figure that exists:

Ripple's XRP	Dec 31, 2024	Mar 31, 2025
Held directly, in its own wallets	4,485,366,320	4,562,433,147
Subject to on-ledger escrow	38,030,000,005	37,130,000,005

Two things worth pulling out of that table. Ripple's escrow fell about 900 million XRP in a single quarter — roughly 300 million a month, not the billion people expect. And as of that final report, roughly 4.5 billion XRP sat in Ripple's own wallets, outside escrow, free to move. Hold onto that second number; it matters in a moment.

The 1 Billion a Month That Isn't 1 Billion a Month

Every month, XRP holders brace for the same headline: one billion XRP just unlocked. It sounds like a billion tokens hitting the market.

It isn't, and the mechanism is the reason why.

On the first of the month, the escrow contracts release up to 1 billion XRP to Ripple automatically. Ripple takes delivery, works out how much it actually needs, and then — this is the part the headline leaves out — sends most of it straight back into a brand-new escrow contract at the back of the queue. In Ripple's own words: "The remaining XRP released is put back into the escrow each month."

You can check the arithmetic against Ripple's last disclosure. Escrow went from 38.03 billion to 37.13 billion across Q1 2025. That's 3 billion released and roughly 2.1 billion re-locked. The net was about 900 million over three months.

The unlock is the headline. What doesn't go back is the number.

Why Circulating Supply Is a Judgment Call, Not a Measurement

Max supply and total supply are things you can verify. Circulating supply isn't — because there is no such field on the XRP Ledger.

Nobody reads it. Somebody decides it.

CoinMarketCap publishes its methodology, and it's more candid than most people expect. It describes circulating supply as "the best approximation of the number of assets that are circulating in the market and in the general public's hands." It says assets held by project teams, foundations, treasuries and escrows are generally excluded. And it admits that where a project's accounting model is complicated, "CoinMarketCap will have to exercise its discretion."

XRP's model is complicated. Escrow is easy — everyone excludes it. But what about the 4.5 billion XRP sitting in Ripple's own wallets — tokens the company holds but has not yet put into the market? Count it, and circulating supply is 4.5 billion higher. Don't, and it's 4.5 billion lower.

That single call moves XRP's market cap by billions of dollars, and it isn't made by the protocol, by the ledger, or by Ripple. It's an editorial decision, and it's why two honest sources can print two different numbers on the same day.

Does XRP's 100 Billion Supply Hold the Price Down?

"XRP can't go up, there are 100 billion of them." You've seen it. It's one of the most common arguments against XRP, and it's built on the wrong number.

The usual rebuttal is that market cap — price times circulating supply — is what matters, not the price per token. That's true, and it's incomplete, because it just swaps one headline number for another.

Here's what an exchange sees that a supply table doesn't.

More than 60 billion XRP is counted as circulating. Almost none of it is for sale. It sits in cold storage, in ETF custody, in exchange reserves, in wallets that haven't moved in years. It is "available to the public" by definition and unavailable at any price in practice.

The XRP your order actually meets is the thin slice resting on an order book right now, and it is smaller than circulating supply by orders of magnitude. That slice — the depth — is what decides whether a large buy nudges the price or moves it. It's what sets your slippage. It's the layer where supply stops being a statistic and starts being a cost you pay.

And here's the part that should be embarrassing: that layer is public. Your order book is on your screen the moment you open a trading page, and aggregators have published ±2% depth for years. It isn't hidden. It's just that almost nobody looks at it before arguing about supply.

So the honest answer: a 100 billion supply doesn't hold XRP's price down. Thin depth does — and that's a different problem with a different fix. More holders and more venues make the book deeper. Minting fewer tokens in 2012 would not have.

Is XRP Deflationary? The XRP Burn Rate, Measured

Technically, yes. Practically, it's a rounding error, and you should know the size of it.

Every XRP Ledger transaction destroys a small fee instead of paying it to a validator. The fee doesn't go to anyone — it ceases to exist. That's what makes XRP's total supply fall, permanently, and it's a spam defense first and a supply mechanism a distant second.

The base cost is 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP. You'll find "$0.0002 per transaction" quoted in a lot of places, including XRPL documentation — but that's a dollar conversion frozen at some past XRP price, and it drifts every time the price moves. The protocol figure is 10 drops. That one doesn't drift.

Now the size. About 14 million XRP have burned since 2012 — out of 100 billion. That's 0.014% of the supply in fourteen years. At that rate, burning through a tenth of XRP would take somewhere north of nine thousand years.

So: XRP is deflationary the way a beach is eroding. It's real, it's measurable, and it is not an investment thesis.

How Many XRP Wallets Are There?

The XRP Ledger passed 8 million funded accounts in 2026. That number is often reported as the number of XRP owners. It isn't — and the error runs in the direction most people don't expect.

The XRP Ledger's own documentation explains why: "private exchanges usually hold all their customers' XRP in a few shared XRP Ledger accounts." If you hold XRP on an exchange, you are not one of those 8 million accounts. Your balance lives inside one of them, pooled with everybody else's. So the real number of XRP owners is almost certainly larger than 8 million, and the ledger cannot tell you what it is.

For the full picture — who holds the most, how concentrated it is, and what the rich list actually shows — see our XRP ownership guide.

How to Check XRP's Supply Yourself

Insert: replaces "Where to Track How Many XRP Are There". Rationale: the old version sent readers to a bare xrpl.org link that shows no supply data, and to a report series that no longer exists. Keywords: xrp supply tracker, current xrp circulating supply, where to check xrp supply

Don't take this article's word for any of it — every figure here is checkable, and the live ones should be checked.

Source	Good for	Watch out for
livenet.xrpl.org	Live ledger state, accounts, transactions	The docs site (xrpl.org) shows no live supply — you want the explorer
XRPScan / Bithomp	Circulating supply, escrow balance, burned total, account count	Each computes circulating supply its own way
ripple.com/xrp	Ripple's own headline figures	Undated, and currently about a year behind the ledger
CoinMarketCap / CoinGecko	The circulating supply that market cap uses	An estimate, per their own methodology — not a ledger reading
Ripple's XRP Markets Report	Ripple's escrow and holdings, Q1 2025 and earlier	Discontinued. Q1 2025 was the last one

The pattern worth internalizing: for anything the protocol fixes, any source will do — 100 billion is 100 billion everywhere. For anything that moves, go to the ledger, and treat every second-hand rendering of it, including Ripple's own website, as a snapshot of whenever someone last updated the page.

FAQ

1. How many XRP are there?

There are exactly 100 billion XRP, all created in 2012, and no more can ever be made.

2. How many XRP are in circulation?

More than 60 billion, with the remainder held in Ripple's on-ledger escrow — check a ledger explorer for today's figure, since it changes monthly.

3. Will more XRP ever be created?

No — the XRP Ledger protocol has no mechanism to mint new tokens, and no vote can add one.

4. How much XRP does Ripple own?

Ripple's last official disclosure, in March 2025, showed about 4.56 billion held directly plus 37.13 billion locked in escrow.

5. How many XRP wallets are there?

The ledger has passed 8 million funded accounts, though the number of actual XRP owners is higher because exchanges pool customers into shared accounts.

6. How much does an XRP transaction cost?

The base cost is 10 drops — 0.00001 XRP — and it's destroyed rather than paid to anyone.

7. Is XRP deflationary?

Technically yes, but only about 14 million XRP have burned in thirteen years, which is 0.014% of the supply.

8. Why does XRP have 100 billion tokens when Bitcoin has 21 million?

XRP was built for payments, where high volume and low fees matter more than scarcity, so it was pre-mined in full rather than released through mining.

Conclusion

So — how many XRP are there? 100 billion, permanently, and that part is settled.

Everything else is a question about who's counting. Total supply is 100 billion minus a trickle of burned fees that will take millennia to matter. Circulating supply is more than 60 billion, and it's an estimate with a judgment call inside it. And the number that actually decides what XRP costs you when you press buy is none of the above — it's the depth of the book you're trading into.

That's the useful takeaway from a supply table: know which numbers are facts, know which ones somebody chose, and know which one you're actually trading against.

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