XRP

XRP is the native coin of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain built for fast, low-cost payments and currency exchange.

The XRP Ledger is a public blockchain built for fast, cheap payments and currency exchange. It went live in June 2012, created by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto; the earliest ledger still on record is from 1 January 2013. XRP is its native coin: every account must hold a small XRP reserve, transaction fees are paid in XRP, and XRP can act as a bridge between two currencies. Transactions settle in about 3–5 seconds.

All 100 billion XRP were created at launch, and no new XRP can ever be issued. Fees are not paid to anyone but destroyed, so supply slowly falls. There is no mining or staking: validators, the computers that agree on each ledger, are not paid. At launch the founders kept 20 billion XRP and gave about 80 billion to the company that became Ripple Labs. In 2017 Ripple locked 55 billion XRP in on-ledger escrow that releases up to 1 billion a month; about 31–32 billion remained locked in September 2026, and at its last report (March 2025) Ripple's escrow and wallets together held about 42% of all XRP.

Ripple Labs is a separate private company, valued at $40 billion in November 2025. It sells payment, custody and treasury services, issues the RLUSD stablecoin, and since October 2025 runs Ripple Prime, a prime broker offering financing and derivatives. From 2020 to 2025 it fought a US SEC lawsuit: the court found its direct XRP sales to institutions were unregistered securities offerings, fined it $125 million and barred further such sales; both appeals were dropped in August 2025. In March 2026 the SEC and CFTC listed XRP as an example of a digital commodity.

The ledger has a built-in exchange and, since March 2024, automated market maker pools. A native lending protocol has been developed but was not enabled on mainnet as of 27 September 2026. About $1.2 billion of stablecoins circulate on the ledger. In the US, XRP is held by spot exchange-traded funds such as the Canary and Bitwise XRP ETFs, which began trading in November 2025.