Every transaction on the XRP Ledger costs a small fee, paid in XRP, and that fee exists to stop the network from being flooded with spam transactions that would otherwise slow it down for everyone.

What happens to that fee is unusual, and it is covered in the next section.

Over the trailing year, people paid $331,401 in fees to use the XRP Ledger. Measured over just the most recent three months and projected across a year instead, the pace comes to $134,307.83, well under half the trailing-year figure. Activity has been declining, and the decline is sharp: monthly fees ran as high as $865,896 in October 2024 and have fallen to under $10,000 a month by mid-2026.

What makes XRP's fee mechanism unusual is not the amount. It is where the money goes. Every single fee paid on the XRP Ledger is destroyed the instant it's paid: not collected by a company, not paid to whoever validated the transaction, not sent to any treasury. It simply stops existing. Since the ledger's creation, this has permanently removed 14,375,309.54 XRP from the total supply, a figure read directly from the ledger itself rather than estimated.

This is worth stating plainly: unlike many networks where fees are shared between a company, a foundation, and the people running the network, XRP's fee mechanism gives nothing to anyone. Whatever value that destruction creates is spread across every single person holding XRP, in the form of a very slightly smaller total supply for everyone else's XRP to be measured against.

XRP's total supply cannot grow. All 100 billion XRP that will ever exist were created when the ledger began, and there has never been a second issuance event of any kind. In that sense, XRP has no faucet at all.

But a large share of that original supply sits in an escrow controlled by Ripple Labs, and it releases on a fixed schedule: 1,000,000,000 XRP on the first of every month, continuing until April 2029. Most of what's released each month is put directly back into a new escrow rather than immediately entering circulation, but the net effect is still substantial: roughly 3.98 billion XRP a year newly available, against circulating supply of 61,977,843,307. That works out to about 6.42% of circulating supply added per year from this one channel alone.

Compare that to the fee burn described above: roughly 256,900 XRP destroyed per year, or about 0.00041% of circulating supply. The ratio between the two is roughly 15,500 to 1. The burn mechanism is real and it is the cleanest in this framework's corpus, but next to the scheduled escrow release, its effect on total supply is close to negligible.

XRP's market value, the price of every XRP in existence multiplied together, is $80,249,326,685. Divide that by the annualised run-rate from the most recent three months and XRP trades at roughly 597,500 times its current yearly fee income. Using the full trailing year instead of the recent run-rate, the multiple is a still-enormous 242,000 times.

For comparison, a wireless network project this framework has used as its example of an extreme, speculative valuation traded at roughly 87,000 times its own annual fees. XRP's multiple, on either measure, is several times larger than that.

There is a real, honest counter-argument, and it deserves to be stated rather than dismissed. A settlement asset whose fees are burned rather than collected was never designed to be valued on fee income in the first place; a near-zero fee take here is the intended design, not a shortfall. That is a fair point about what XRP is for. It does not change the fact that, on the specific question of how its price compares to its measured activity, the gap is larger here than for any other project assessed by this framework.

As of 30 June 2026, Ripple Labs holds 37,656,053,914 XRP, about 37.66% of everything in existence. Of that, 32,600,000,000 sits in the escrow described earlier, and the remaining 5,056,053,914 is held outside it. At an earlier snapshot, 31 March 2025, Ripple's position was larger still: 41,692,433,152 XRP, or about 41.69% of supply at the time.

These figures come from Ripple's own website, not from an independent filing. Ripple used to publish a structured quarterly disclosure of these numbers; that practice ended after the first quarter of 2025. What exists now is a live company webpage stating the current figures without a fixed publication date, updated periodically and replaced each time rather than archived. The numbers reconcile correctly against the ledger's own total supply, so there is no reason to doubt them, but they carry less formal weight than a dated report would.

One company holding more than a third of an asset, and controlling the multi-year schedule on which thirty-two billion more of it becomes available, is a genuinely large concentration by any standard. It is worth being precise about what that concentration does and does not mean, which the next section addresses.

Ripple Labs owning a large share of XRP does not, by itself, give it control over how the XRP Ledger operates. Changes to the ledger's rules are decided by validator voting: a supermajority of trusted validators has to agree before anything changes, and owning XRP does not grant a vote in that process the way it might in a token-weighted governance system elsewhere.

Which validators are actually trusted is a separate question, and it has a real answer. The XRP Ledger Foundation publishes a cryptographically signed list of validators most participants trust by default, currently 35 of them, current as of a version dated 3 July 2026. A public validator explorer, cross-checked against that same signed list, identifies who operates them: Ripple itself runs two, and the rest are a mix of cryptocurrency exchanges, companies built around the XRP Ledger, and a substantial number of universities.

Two honest limits apply to that picture. Every operator's identity on the public list is self-reported, not independently verified. And whether those 35 validators are genuinely independent of each other, or of Ripple, has not been audited by anyone outside the organizations involved. The count and the roster are real and current; how independent the roster actually is remains an open question.

Two distinct security events appear in the public record. Conflating them would misstate both.

The larger one, roughly $112.5 million worth of XRP, was a personal-wallet compromise, not a breach of the network or the company. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen described it as "unauthorized access to a few of my personal XRP accounts (not @Ripple)," and Ripple's own leadership confirmed that no Ripple-managed wallets were affected. This was a theft from an individual, using the XRP Ledger to move stolen funds, not a failure of the ledger itself.

Separately, a software library Ripple recommends for developers, called xrpl.js, was briefly compromised: malicious code capable of stealing private keys was inserted into several published versions. It was caught and removed within roughly seventeen hours, and the XRP Ledger Foundation confirmed that the ledger's own codebase and infrastructure were never affected. No confirmed user losses are recorded from this incident.