What is XRP

100 Billion Tokens and the Company That Holds Them Part 3 of 5: XRP's supply, the escrow nobody understands, and how it differs from everything else Reading time: ~10 minutes Most crypto arguments are about technology. The XRP argument is about ownership . In Part 1 we covered the decision that created all 100 billion XRP in a single moment and handed them to a company. In Part 2 we looked at what the ledger does and ran the uncomfortable math on how much XRP the world actually needs. Now the token itself. Who owns it, how much of it is coming, and what you're really buying when you buy some. The supply, in one table Maximum supply 100,000,000,000 XRP — fixed forever, cannot increase Created All at once, in 2012 Circulating now Roughly 62–63 billion Held in escrow by Ripple Roughly 35 billion In Ripple's operating wallets Around 3 billion Destroyed since 2012 About 14 million Staking rewards None Interest, dividends, or yield None Two of those rows do most of the work. "Fixed forever, cannot increase" is genuinely true and genuinely unusual. There is no mechanism to create more XRP. Bitcoin has a hard cap too, but it's still issuing new coins until roughly 2140. Ethereum has no cap at all. XRP's ceiling was reached on day one. "None" and "None" is the other half. Owning XRP entitles you to nothing. No staking rewards, no share of network fees, no dividend, no vote. Bitcoin holders get nothing either — but Ethereum holders can stake and earn a yield that behaves a little like a bond coupon. XRP has no equivalent. The only way to make money on XRP is for the price to go up. Worth stating plainly, because a lot of writing about crypto blurs this: there is no cash flow to value here. No discounted cash flow model exists. The price is whatever the next buyer will pay. The escrow, explained properly This is the most misunderstood thing about XRP, and it's misunderstood in both directions — critics overstate the danger, supporters overstate the safeguard. Here's what…