XRP Supply Shock: Could Liquidity Vanish Overnight?
- Antwan Koss
- September 18, 2025
- Analytics
- 0 Comments
You know, I woke up to this rumor myself and my first thought was, “That sounds completely ridiculous.” But then again, in crypto, sometimes the craziest ideas have a kernel of truth to them. So I decided to look into it instead of just dismissing it out of hand.
What Does “Circulating Supply” Actually Mean?
The whole thing started with a viral claim that XRP’s supply could just vanish. Obviously, the tokens don’t disappear from the ledger—that’s not how any of this works. But the idea that the *available* supply might be way lower than we think? That part is actually worth talking about.
If you check the usual data sites, you get different numbers. CoinMarketCap says about 59.6 billion XRP are circulating. XRPScan says 64.7 billion. That difference alone tells you that “circulating” is a term that gets defined differently depending on who you ask.
The Illusion of Available XRP
A big chunk of that so-called circulating supply is tied up in Ripple’s escrow. We’re talking about 35.3 billion XRP. It’s on the ledger, sure, but it’s not exactly sitting on exchanges ready to be bought. It gets released on a schedule, and a lot of it just gets re-locked. For practical purposes, it’s off the market.
And it’s not just escrow. There are almost certainly large holders—banks, fintech companies, maybe even some whales—who are sitting on their XRP and not selling. When you add all that up, the actual liquid supply, the stuff that’s really available to trade at any moment, might be way smaller. Some in the community guess it could be in the 20 to 30 billion range. Nobody knows for sure, but the headline number feels misleading.
A Potential for a Squeeze
So here’s the theory. If demand for XRP were to spike suddenly, maybe from some big institutional use case, the market might quickly realize there isn’t as much XRP for sale as everyone assumed. Order books could get thin. And if that happens, the price could move—a lot.
It’s less about supply vanishing and more about available inventory drying up because nobody wants to sell. It’s like if a million people tried to buy tickets for a 20,000-seat venue. The price of those tickets wouldn’t just go up; it would skyrocket.
The guy in the video tied this idea to the growing trend of tokenizing real-world assets—things like gold, debt, or stablecoins on a blockchain. The XRP Ledger wants to be the settlement layer for all that. If it succeeds, even partially, the demand for XRP to facilitate those trades could be enormous.
Of course, this is all a big “if.” It might happen on another platform entirely. It might happen slowly. Or it might not happen at all. The analyst was careful to say he’s not giving financial advice and that this is all highly speculative.
The phrase “vanish overnight” is clearly an exaggeration. But the underlying point—that a liquidity squeeze is possible if demand outpaces the truly available supply—that part seems at least plausible. It’s not a prediction, just a possible scenario that’s a bit more nuanced than the wild rumor it started from.
At press time, XRP was trading around $3.02.
