What Is XRP? The Ledger, the Supply and the Court Ruling
XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain whose code created a fixed supply of 100 billion XRP when it launched in 2012. It pays the ledger's small transaction fee, which is destroyed rather than paid to anyone, and 80 billion of the original units went to the company now called Ripple.
XRP is one of the most talked-about coins and one of the least explained. This page sticks to what can be checked: how the ledger it runs on works, where the supply came from, what the court actually ruled, and what nine years of daily prices show.
How it works
XRP is the built-in currency of the XRP Ledger. The ledger’s documentation at xrpl.org, read on 25 Sep 2026, says it was built over 2011 and early 2012 by Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz. Like any blockchain, it keeps a shared record of balances that many computers hold copies of.
It does not use mining. Where Bitcoin asks computers to compete on proof-of-work, the XRP Ledger’s consensus pages describe servers that each choose a list of validators they trust and vote on the next version of the ledger. The same pages give settlement as three to six seconds.
That design swaps computing power for trust in a chosen group. It makes each ledger version quick and cheap to produce, and it means the question of who runs the validators matters more than it does on a mined chain.
Each XRP splits into one million units called drops. The court opinion in the SEC case states this too, along with the fixed supply: the ledger’s code created 100 billion XRP at launch, and no more can be made.
Every transaction destroys a little XRP. The xrpl.org page on transaction cost says the fee “is not paid to any party: the XRP is irrevocably destroyed.” The current minimum for a standard transaction is 10 drops, and it rises when the network is busy. So the supply can only shrink, slowly.
An account must also hold a reserve. The reserves page lists a base reserve of 1 XRP on the main network, plus 0.2 XRP for each item an account owns in the ledger. That reserve cannot be sent, which is how the ledger discourages people from filling it with empty accounts.
Who holds the supply
The founders split the supply before anyone could buy it. The 13 Jul 2023 opinion says the three founders kept 20 billion XRP for themselves and provided 80 billion to Ripple, and that none of it was sold before the ledger launched. Ripple was founded in 2012; the opinion notes it was first named NewCoin and renamed OpenCoin that October.
In 2017 Ripple locked 55 billion XRP in escrow, according to xrpl.org, “to ensure that the amount entering the general supply grows predictably.” Escrow releases it over time rather than all at once.
That concentration is the fact that shapes XRP’s market. One company has held tens of billions of units and has sold them over years. The opinion records that Ripple owned between 50 and 80 billion XRP at all times before the end of 2020, and used the proceeds from its sales to fund its operations.
What the court ruled
The SEC sued Ripple on 22 Dec 2020, alleging that its sales of XRP were unregistered securities offerings. On 13 Jul 2023, Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York ruled on both sides' motions for summary judgment, and the answer depended on who bought the XRP and how.
The institutional sales lost. The SEC alleged that Ripple sold about $728.9 million of XRP to institutional buyers and hedge funds under written contracts. The court held that these “constituted the unregistered offer and sale of investment contracts,” because those buyers could reasonably expect Ripple’s efforts to raise the price.
The exchange sales won. Ripple’s sales on trading platforms, about $757.6 million by the SEC’s count, were “blind bid/ask transactions”: neither side knew who the other was. The court held these were not investment contracts, and the same for the $609 million of XRP Ripple paid out for services.
The token itself was not the question. The opinion says XRP “is not in and of itself” a contract of the kind securities law covers; what mattered was the circumstances of each sale. That distinction is why the ruling was read so differently by different people, and why a headline saying “XRP is not a security” simplifies it.
A worked example
Start with the fee, using the 24 Sep 2026 close of $1.533114. A standard transaction burns 10 drops, which is 10 divided by 1,000,000, or 0.00001 XRP. At that price the fee is 0.00001 times $1.533114, about $0.0000153, far below a cent.
The reserve costs more than the fee. A new account must keep 1 XRP, worth $1.53 at the same close, that it cannot send. An account holding five items in the ledger needs 1 plus 5 times 0.2, or 2 XRP.
Now the price risk, with a hypothetical $1,000. Bought at the highest close in the data, $3.555765 on 21 Jul 2025, $1,000 buys 1,000 divided by 3.555765, or 281.23 XRP. At the 24 Sep 2026 close those units are worth 281.23 times $1.533114, or $431.16.
Getting back to $1,000 needs more than the fall suggests. The price fell 56.88%, but climbing from $1.533114 back to $3.555765 is a rise of 131.93%, because the percentage is measured from a smaller base. That asymmetry is the core arithmetic of any drawdown.
The original data
The data: 3,242 daily closes of XRP in US dollars, from 9 Nov 2017 to 24 Sep 2026, downloaded from Yahoo Finance on 25 Sep 2026 and published as a CSV of XRP closes. Each close is the end of a UTC day.
The year-end closes run $2.30 for 2017, $0.35 for 2018, $0.19 for 2019, $0.22 for 2020, $0.83 for 2021, $0.34 for 2022, $0.61 for 2023, $2.08 for 2024 and $1.84 for 2025, with $1.53 on 24 Sep 2026. The lowest close in the file is $0.139635, on 12 Mar 2020.
Year over year, the swings are extreme in both directions. From one year-end close to the next, XRP changed -84.67% in 2018, -45.31% in 2019, 13.97% in 2020, 278.07% in 2021, -59.10% in 2022, 80.90% in 2023, 238.26% in 2024 and -11.55% in 2025.
Four of the eight years were losses. The four gains came in 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024. The best year, 2021, and the worst, 2018, sit 362.73 percentage points apart.
The court dates moved the price more than most years’ news. XRP closed at $0.516944 on 21 Dec 2020, the day before the SEC filed, and at $0.258602 two days later, a fall of 49.97%. It closed at $0.471105 on 12 Jul 2023 and at $0.815365 on the day of the ruling, a rise of 73.08% in one day.
The video coverage is loud and small. In the 24,971-video corpus this site studies, 19 titles from 15 channels contain XRP, counting each video once by video id. The 18 with a view count have a median of 4,665 views, and only 2 passed 20,000.
Six of the 19 titles use BOMBSHELL, BREAKING or SHOCKING, or a run of two or more exclamation marks, and 5 mention a regulator, Congress or a bill. The coverage is mostly about the next headline, not about the ledger or the supply.
When it fails
The first failure is trading the headline. The two court dates above moved the price by half in opposite directions. A position sized for an ordinary week does not survive a day like that, and the news arrives with no warning of which way it will cut.
The second is reading the ruling as settled for everyone. The 2023 opinion decided one case in one district court on the facts of Ripple’s own sales. It did not decide how every other token, or every future sale, will be treated.
A third is ignoring who holds the supply. A large holder that sells over time adds supply to the market whatever the news says. The escrow makes the pace more predictable; it does not make the selling stop.
A fourth is sending to the wrong place. Per xrpl.org, a payment to an exchange can carry a destination tag that says which customer to credit, and a ledger version is final once it is validated. A payment sent without the right tag can leave the exchange to sort it out by hand.
And a fifth is buying the forecast. Titles promising a target price are selling attention. Nothing in the ledger or the court record supports any particular price, and the 2025 high was followed by a fall of more than half in fourteen months.
Related
The Bitcoin page covers the coin whose mined ledger the XRP Ledger was built to be an alternative to.
The crypto page explains what every coin shares as a market, from the missing close to the lack of a single price. And the drawdown page works through why a 56.88% fall needs a 131.93% rise to recover.
Treat XRP news as a volatility event, not a direction. Size the position before the headline for a move that could run either way by half, and decide in advance whether a court date is something to hold through or step aside from.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.