Circulating Supply vs. Total Supply
Why XRP's 100 billion total supply figure is different from its circulating supply, and how to check the current numbers.
Discussions of XRP's supply often conflate two different numbers, which can lead to confusion about how much XRP is actually available in the market.
Total supply
The total supply is the full 100 billion XRP created at the ledger's genesis in 2012, minus the (small, gradually accumulating) amount permanently destroyed through fee burning since then. This number only ever decreases, very slowly, and represents the absolute ceiling on how much XRP could ever exist.
Circulating supply
The circulating supply is the portion of the total supply that is actually held outside of locked or otherwise-unavailable arrangements — in practice, the main thing separating total supply from circulating supply is the XRP still sitting in Ripple's escrow contracts that has not yet been released.
Because Ripple routinely re-locks a large share of each monthly escrow release back into new escrow contracts (see Escrow Program), the circulating supply has grown more slowly and gradually than a naive "1 billion XRP unlocked per month" calculation would suggest.
Why this distinction matters
- Market analysis. Metrics like market capitalization are typically calculated against circulating supply, not total supply, so conflating the two produces a misleadingly large market cap figure.
- Supply overhang concerns. Critics have historically pointed to the large escrowed balance as a standing "overhang" — a reminder that a large share of total supply is still, in principle, available to enter circulation over time, even though the schedule for doing so is transparent and rate-limited.
- Comparability. Comparing XRP's circulating supply to other assets' circulating supply (rather than mixing circulating and total figures across different assets) is necessary for an apples-to-apples comparison — see XRP vs. Bitcoin and XRP vs. Ethereum for supply-model comparisons with other major assets.
Where to check current figures
Because both figures change continuously (total supply shrinks gradually via burning; circulating supply grows in discrete steps as escrow tranches are released and partly sold), this wiki does not reproduce a specific current number — check a live block explorer or market data aggregator for up-to-date figures.