Start with what is established: XRP costs $1.33 on Wednesday midday, 2.07 percent more than 24 hours earlier, and stands around 10 percent below its level of a month ago. In four days, on Nov
Start with what is established: XRP costs $1.33 on Wednesday midday, 2.07 percent more than 24 hours earlier, and stands around 10 percent below its level of a month ago. In four days, on November 1, the next escrow contract expires, one of those with which Ripple has kept part of its XRP holdings locked since 2017. Our assessment follows below: by our own measurements the release is no price driver, and the level that really counts this week sits lower. Where the price can go over a horizon of months is set out in our XRP price prediction.
The price has been moving in a narrow range since the weekend. The daily low is $1.30, the daily high $1.34, and over the past 24 hours XRP worth $1.64 billion changed hands. With a market capitalisation of $84.2 billion, XRP ranks fifth among the largest cryptocurrencies.
Over a week the figure is down 1.31 percent, over a month down 10.24 percent. The all-time high of $3.65, reached on July 17, 2025, is 63.6 percent away. The distance on the downside is smaller than the monthly balance suggests: the low of the past 30 days dates from October 18 and sits at $1.2927, barely three percent below the current level.
Escrow is a function of the XRP blockchain itself, not a contract with a bank. An escrow is an object in the ledger that holds an amount of XRP and only releases it at a set point in time. Whoever creates the object cannot dissolve it before expiry, and the date sits in the ledger data for anyone to read. The technical description is in the XRP Ledger documentation.
Ripple has used this function since December 2017 to break its own XRP holdings into monthly tranches. One of them expires each month. What the company does not use goes back into new contracts with later expiry, by its own account, so that only a fraction of the amount freed up each time reaches the market at all. Ripple publishes the exact split per month in its quarterly reports, not day by day.
For the market that means the first of a month is a known date, not a surprise. Any participant can look the expiry up in the ledger weeks in advance. That is precisely why the question is interesting: does the date still move the price at all?
For this article we analysed the daily XRP closing prices of the past twelve months and, for every first of a month from November 1, 2025 to October 1, 2026, calculated how the price developed three and seven days later. The price series comes from CoinGecko, the calculation is our own.
The result: three days after the release, XRP stood lower in six of twelve cases and higher in six. The median value is plus 0.55 percent. After seven days the ratio is again six to six, with a median of minus 1.59 percent. The spread is wide: the worst case was June 1, 2026 at minus 9.89 percent after three days, the best January 1, 2026 at plus 9.62 percent.
The comparison with the normal case is what matters. Take all three-day windows of the past year, including those without a release, and 60 percent of them ended in the red, at a median of minus 0.75 percent. For seven-day windows it was 64 percent in the red and minus 1.95 percent. After an escrow release, XRP therefore ran slightly better on average than in any randomly chosen period, not worse.
Twelve data points are not a large sample, and the number carries no forecast for any single month. What the number does refute is the expectation that the first of a month regularly drags XRP down. Reading the date as a reason to sell means reading something into the data that is not there.
Four days to the next expiry: the November 1 date has sat in the XRP blockchain's ledger for years.
Of the 99.99 billion XRP that exist in total, 63.35 billion are in circulation. The difference of 36.63 billion units sits outside the tradable supply, for the most part in Ripple's escrow contracts. That is 36.6 percent of the total amount.
This number is the real background to the debate. Unlike Bitcoin, where new units arise only through mining and the rate halves every four years, at XRP all units already exist. Supply does not grow, it is reallocated. Whether a tranche goes into circulation or moves back into a new contract is decided by a single company, and that is a structural difference that cannot be argued away.
At the same time, this situation has been unchanged since December 2017 and is priced in. It would only be new if Ripple changed the rhythm or released substantially more than usual into the market. There is no evidence of that before November 1.
The scale can be placed with two figures, both public. One billion XRP is worth roughly $1.33 billion at the current price. XRP turnover over the past 24 hours was $1.64 billion. The entire tranche would therefore amount to about 81 percent of a single trading day, and it never reaches the market in one block.
Here is how the mechanism works on the price: supply that is sold only pushes the price down when it meets too little demand. An amount that spreads over weeks and stays below a single day's turnover disappears into the noise of normal trading. That is why the date barely shows up in the price data, even though the absolute quantity sounds large.
The second place to look, besides the chart, is the behaviour of exchange balances. If fresh supply is actually being sold, XRP balances on the venues rise before the sale. That movement can be traced on the public addresses in the days after the 1st, and it is the more honest indicator than the sheer size of the tranche.
Three levels can be justified for the coming days, and none of them hangs on the first of the month.
On the downside, the low of October 18 at $1.2927 counts first. Directly below it run two moving averages close together: the 100-day line at $1.2963 and the 200-day line at $1.2786. That cluster makes the area between $1.28 and $1.30 the most important zone on the downside. A daily close below it and XRP loses all of its support from the summer.
On the upside the next hurdle is the 50-day line, currently at $1.4012. Above that comes the monthly high of October 5 at $1.5197. Around 5.4 percent lies between the current level and the 50-day line, and as long as that line holds, the recovery since October 18 remains a counter-move within a downtrend.
The gap between the 100-day and 200-day lines is currently only 1.8 cents. Two moving averages sitting that close together show a market without clear direction. Only when the lines move apart again does a trend emerge that a longer-term view can be pinned to.
What Ripple does not use moves into new escrow contracts with later expiry, according to the company.
On October 26 we asked in this space whether the $1.27 level would hold while Ripple's Swell conference opened in New York. That is in our XRP read of October 26. The answer after two days: the level held, and with room to spare.
The price stood at $1.2944 on October 26 and is at $1.33 today. That is a gain of 2.7 percent in two days. The lowest level since then was $1.2944, so the $1.27 mark was not even tested. What has been added since is the return above the 100-day line, which on October 26 still ran just above the price.
What was open on October 26 stays open: volume is not carrying the recovery. At $1.64 billion in 24 hours, turnover sits within the range of the past week, without the push a durable change of direction needs.
What can move the price far more this week than the release comes on Wednesday evening. The US central bank announces the result of its meeting on October 28; the dates are listed in the official calendar of the Federal Open Market Committee. For European investors the announcement falls in the early evening.
The link to crypto runs through risk appetite. Falling rates make borrowed capital cheaper and assets without a running yield more attractive; rising rates, or rates held high for longer, work the other way. XRP follows that movement like the rest of the market, with no leverage of its own. Any price move in the coming days should therefore first be held against the broader market before it is attributed to the first of the month.
In practice: a decline on November 2 or 3 that Bitcoin and Ether join on a similar scale has nothing to do with the release. Only a move in which XRP runs markedly worse than the market would point to supply pressure of its own.
For investors in Germany the date carries no tax significance, and a concrete action follows from that. What counts under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act is your own holding period: anyone holding XRP for more than a year sells tax-free, whatever the size of the gain. Within the year, an allowance of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposal transactions together. Exceed it and the entire gain is taxable, not only the part above it. We have summarised the current state of the reform debate under crypto holding period.
The sensible first step is therefore a look at your own purchase history. Anyone who bought in November or December 2025 reaches the one-year mark in the coming weeks, and that date decides the tax burden. The order of sales follows the principle that the units bought first count as sold first, separately per exchange. A tax tool or portfolio tracker makes that allocation automatically and delivers the statement for the tax return.
On custody the usual applies: holdings on an exchange are a claim against the company, holdings in your own wallet belong to you. Which devices come into question is shown in our hardware wallet comparison. Anyone intending to hold XRP past the one-year mark has no reason to leave it sitting on a trading venue in the meantime. The XRP blockchain's minimum reserve for your own address is locked permanently and belongs in the calculation.
In the editorial team's view, the escrow release of November 1 carries no price statement of its own. Three pieces of evidence support that: the six-to-six ratio in our twelve-month analysis, the comparison with the base rate of 60 percent negative three-day windows in the same year, and the scale of 81 percent of one day's turnover for an amount that is never sold in one block.
Against it stands the fact that twelve observations are few, and that an unusually large release could behave differently from the twelve measured. The analysis also covers a year in which XRP fell overall; in a rising market, fresh supply can work differently.
The more likely path for the coming days is this: direction is settled by the rate decision and by the zone between $1.28 and $1.30, not by the calendar. That is explicitly not a recommendation to buy or sell, and a total loss remains possible with any cryptocurrency.
Three steps that can be worked through before the weekend:
(As of October 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
