The XRP Ledger destroyed 398.19 XRP for good on Sunday. That is no estimate but the difference between two closed ledgers: early on Saturday afternoon the network showed 99,985,590,096.59 XRP
The XRP Ledger destroyed 398.19 XRP for good on Sunday. That is no estimate but the difference between two closed ledgers: early on Saturday afternoon the network showed 99,985,590,096.59 XRP, by Sunday afternoon 99,985,589,698.40. On November 1 the counter-movement arrives, when the escrow contracts open and release 1 billion XRP.
A factor of 2.5 million separates those two figures. Where the price can point over a horizon of months is set out in our XRP price prediction. This piece takes on the supply side, with numbers that come straight from the blockchain and that nobody else reports in this form.
Every closed ledger carries a field called total_coins. It states how many XRP exist at that moment. In the ledger numbered 107,739,858, closed early on Sunday afternoon, the value reads 99,985,589,698.399227 XRP.
The network started in 2012 with exactly 100 billion XRP. There can never be more, because the XRP Ledger has no way of issuing new units. Only the reverse route exists: every transaction costs a fee, and that fee goes to nobody. The amount disappears from total supply.
XRP trades at $1.29 on Sunday afternoon, 0.26 percent below its level 24 hours earlier. The daily high was $1.30, the daily low $1.27. Market capitalisation stands at $81.69 billion on daily turnover of $1.01 billion, which makes it fifth in the market. It remains 64.7 percent short of its record of $3.65 from July 2025.
The 100 billion at launch and today's ledger reading give the full balance: 14,410,301.60 XRP have been burned since day one. Across fourteen years of operation and more than 107 million closed ledgers.
Measured against the launch supply, that is 0.0144 percent. Measured against today's circulating supply of 63.13 billion XRP, it is 0.0228 percent. At the current price, the entire burn of those fourteen years comes to the equivalent of around $18.6 million. On the exchanges a comparable sum changes hands in about 27 minutes on a quiet Sunday.
That figure rarely appears in articles about XRP, because nobody publishes it separately. It can only be read off by subtracting the current ledger reading from the launch supply.
The pace tells you more than the cumulative balance. For that, older ledgers can be pulled from the archive and their total_coins field compared with today's reading.
Over the past 24 hours the network destroyed 398.19 XRP. Across seven days it was 2,840.98 XRP, across thirty days 24,271.14 XRP. At a price of $1.29 that comes to $514 a day and $31,310 a month.
Per closed ledger, 0.018 XRP of that remains. The monthly figure of 24,271 XRP equals 0.0000384 percent of circulating supply. At this pace it takes a good 41,000 months to burn a single billion XRP.
On the left the monthly burn, on the right the monthly release from escrow: that is how far apart the two quantities sit.
One XRP divides into a million drops. The base fee on a simple payment is ten drops, or 0.00001 XRP. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, that fee reaches neither a validator nor a miner. It is struck from total supply instead and is therefore gone.
The reason is technical and has nothing to do with the price. The fee is there to prevent spam: anyone wanting to flood the network with millions of empty transactions has to destroy real money to do it. The rules are set out in the network's developer documentation on the transaction cost.
Then there is the minimum reserve. A new account on the XRP Ledger has to hold 1 XRP permanently, and every additional object such as a trust line or an open trading order ties up a further 0.2 XRP. That reserve is not burned, but it is locked for as long as the account exists. If you move XRP from an exchange to your own wallet, factor in that one XRP, or the account stays unusable. The details are in the documentation on reserves.
Sunday's 398.19 XRP amount to 39.8 million drops. At ten drops per transaction that would be almost four million transactions. There were not that many.
A sample of twelve ledgers spread evenly across the 24 hours gives an average of 92.4 transactions per ledger. With 22,154 ledgers closed that day, that works out at around 2.05 million transactions. From that follows an average fee paid of roughly 194 drops, about nineteen times the minimum rate. The transaction count is an extrapolation from that sample, while the burned quantity is measured exactly.
The premium has two causes. For one, the fee rises automatically as soon as a ledger is heavily loaded. For another, certain operations cost more than a simple payment: creating an account, cancelling an escrow contract or collecting several signatures all register a multiple. The network's load factor stood at one on Sunday, its resting value.
That is what makes the arithmetic revealing. As our escrow analysis of October 17 set out, escrow contracts from 2017 open again on November 1 and release 1 billion XRP. Net of the customary re-locks, around 300 million XRP of that most recently stayed in circulation.
Against that stand 24,271 XRP burned in a month. To take just the net quantity of a single monthly release back out of the world, the network would need 12,360 months at today's pace. That is 1,030 years. For the full billion it would be 3,433 years.
Turned around: everything the XRP Ledger has burned in fourteen years of operation equals 1.44 percent of a single monthly release. The 14.4 million XRP burned since 2012 face 1,000 million on one November day.
In forums and in promotional copy you regularly read that XRP is deflationary because the supply falls with every transaction. Formally the second half of that sentence holds. Total supply does fall, and it can never rise again.
Economically the claim still does not carry. What counts for a price is not theoretical total supply but tradable supply. And that grows, because hundreds of millions of XRP move from escrow into circulation every month while the burn stays in the tens of thousands. Both movements run at the same time, yet they sit four orders of magnitude apart.
An image makes the ratio tangible. If the monthly release were a full freight train, the monthly burn would be a handful of gravel on one of its wagons.
On Saturday morning XRP traded at $1.31, when we described the escrow mechanics and the 55 contracts from 2017. Two cents have come off since then, and the price stands at $1.29.
The $1.29 level named there as the lower edge has therefore been reached, though not durably broken. The daily low of $1.27 sat below it, after which the price turned back up. Added over these good 28 hours are 398 burned XRP and around 2.4 million transactions.
On November 1 the escrow contracts open again and release 1 billion XRP.
Two hundred daily closes give an average of $1.2799. The current price sits 0.8 percent above it, around one cent. To the downside that is the next level with a basis, and it almost coincides with the sixty-day low of $1.2682 from August 21. Two levels derived independently at the same spot weigh more than one.
Upwards the picture differs. The 30-day line sits at $1.4437, the 50-day line at $1.4147 and the 7-day line at $1.3239. The price stands below all three. The sixty-day high of $1.5713 from September 23 is 21.8 percent away.
The nearest hurdle is therefore the 7-day line at $1.32, not three cents away. Above that, the next level that can be justified only begins at $1.41.
Our assessment: the fee burn does not work as a price argument for XRP, and the numbers in this piece show that in both directions. 24,271 XRP a month against 300 million net from escrow gives a ratio of one to 12,360. Anyone buying XRP for a shrinking supply is buying a property that, at this pace, never takes effect within an investing lifetime.
A fair objection belongs alongside it. The argument turns if network load rises durably. The average fee paid on Sunday was nineteen times the minimum rate even though the load factor sat at its resting value. A network with ten times the transactions and periodically high fees would produce different numbers. That case has not been measured so far, it is hoped for. What is measurable today is set out above.
The price over the next two weeks is therefore moved by the known quantities: November 1 with the release, the fund flows and the level at $1.28. The burn is not among them. With any cryptocurrency, a total loss is also possible.
For investors in Germany, more hangs on the calendar than on the supply arithmetic. In private assets, XRP falls under private disposals pursuant to Paragraph 23 of the German Income Tax Act. Hold a position for longer than twelve months and sell it afterwards, and no tax is due on the gain.
Within the twelve months an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros a year applies to all private disposals taken together. Go above it and the full gain is taxed at your personal rate, not only the part above the threshold. Losses from the same year can be set against it, though only within this category of income. How the legislator intends to proceed with the one-year period is something we track continuously in the status of the holding-period reform.
In practice that means anyone who bought XRP in October or November 2025 reaches the anniversary in these weeks. For such positions, a sale after the cut-off date changes the tax bill, regardless of what happens with the escrow on November 1. The purchase date appears on the exchange statement; where there were several purchases, the order of acquisition applies.
The supply side of XRP can be summed up in one sentence this Sunday: the network destroys 398 XRP a day and gets 1 billion back into circulation on November 1. Three steps follow from that:
(As of October 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
