XRP
About XRP
The price of XRP (XRP) is $0.58544340 today, as of Sep 16 08:25 p.m., with a 24-hour trading volume of $1.89B. Over the last 24 hours, the price has increased by 0.41%. XRP currently has a circulating supply of 56.33B and a market cap of $32.98B.
XRP is the native cryptocurrency of XRP Ledger, which is an open-source, public blockchain designed to facilitate faster and cheaper payments.
Sending payments overseas using the legacy financial system typically takes one to four business days and can be expensive. If a person uses XRP as a bridging currency, it’s possible to settle cross-border transactions in less than five seconds on the open-source XRP Ledger blockchain at a fraction of the cost of the more traditional methods.
The original founders pre-mined (created at the time of the ledger’s launch) 100 billion XRP tokens in 2012. This is all the XRP in existence, and no more XRP can be created. The founders provided Ripple with 80 billion tokens to fund future operations and development, while the founders divided the remaining XRP among themselves.
Unlike bitcoin and other mined cryptocurrencies, where new coins enter the market in the form of block rewards, XRP enters circulation whenever Ripple decides to sell coins from its pre-mined stash on the secondary market.
In 2017, the company transferred 55 billion of its 80 billion XRP tokens into an escrow account from which it could sell a maximum of 1 billion tokens per month on the secondary market. Ripple did that to improve the transparency and predictability of XRP sales. XRP held in escrow are “undistributed” whereas the rest (including XRP held by Ripple in wallets) is distributed (i.e. circulating supply).
At the end of each month, unsold tokens are returned to escrow and re-distributed at a later period. Over the last 32 months, 32 billion XRPs have been released from escrow, and 26.7 billion have been returned.
As of January 2022, the escrow account holds 46.5 billion XRP tokens. Ripple publishes the data on its website.
In the three and a half years following the launch of XRP in 2012, its price experienced two significant jumps, including in December 2013 when XRP’s price surged almost 11-fold in 15 days and then one year later, when the price soared 454% in 33 days.
After that, XRP’s price remained under $0.01 until the crypto market began to build momentum in early 2017. Between March 22, 2017, and Jan. 8, 2018, XRP’s price went parabolic in line with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at the time, rising by more than 51,000% from under one cent to a height of $3.40.
XRP failed to maintain its momentum above the $3 level, and in a few months, the price fell to $0.10. XRP price remained beneath that level until April 2021, when the broader crypto market began to rise again. That month, XRP price reached a year-to-date high of $1.98. The surge, however, was short-lived, and the price tumbled to less than $1.