Community Trust ScoreVerified
Ripple is sitting at the middle of a real fight. Not a legal one this time — an internal one, driven by its own community, over how fast the company should release XRP from escrow and whether the current pace is quietly strangling the token’s long-term credibility.
Australian lawyer Bill Morgan kicked it off. He wants Ripple to relock less XRP each month after its scheduled releases, arguing that moving faster toward a fully circulating supply would turn XRP into what he calls a “hard money” asset. The logic is pretty straightforward: eliminate the supply overhang, remove the uncertainty, and let the market price XRP based on what’s actually out there rather than what might come out next year or the year after. Right now, 32.74 billion XRP sits locked in escrow, with a distribution timeline that stretches nearly nine years into the future. That’s a long shadow hanging over any price discovery.
How the Escrow System Actually Works
Ripple built the escrow setup back in 2017. Every month, 1 billion XRP gets released. Whatever Ripple doesn’t need for operations or distributions gets relocked — back into escrow, back onto the timeline. It’s a controlled drip, not a flood. Morgan’s argument is that relocking less of that monthly release would compress the timeline, get XRP to full circulation faster, and make the supply picture cleaner for anyone trying to model the asset seriously.
That sounds reasonable on the surface. But Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, David Schwartz, isn’t buying a radical overhaul. He pushed back specifically on ideas like burning the escrowed XRP outright, pointing to Stellar’s token burn as a cautionary example. Stellar did it. The market didn’t reward Stellar with sustained gains. Schwartz’s read is that the current model keeps supply predictable, and predictability is basically the whole point when you’re trying to court institutional partners and stay on the right side of regulators. Burn the escrow or dump it all at once, and you’ve torched the thing that made the system trustworthy to begin with.
Not everyone agrees. Morgan’s camp sees the controlled release as a feature that’s slowly becoming a liability.
The Community Split and the Sell Pressure Problem
The XRP community is genuinely divided, and it’s not a clean split between insiders and retail holders. Some of Morgan’s supporters are serious market observers who think the scheduled unlocks create a structural ceiling on XRP’s valuation. Their view: if the total supply is known and all of it is circulating, institutions can price the asset with confidence. The periodic unlock schedule, by contrast, introduces a recurring question mark every single month.
Opponents of a faster release raise a different concern — one that’s probably more immediately practical. If Ripple starts relocking less and more XRP hits the open market each month, where does the demand come from to absorb it? Right now, the demand signals aren’t exactly screaming that the market can handle a bigger monthly release without taking a hit on price. More supply without more demand is just sell pressure. That’s not a complicated equation, and it’s the argument that keeps the status quo looking safer than any alternative.
Ripple, for its part, hasn’t moved. The company hasn’t shown any real intention to change the escrow strategy. It’s leaning into regulatory credibility instead — MiCA approvals in Europe being the most recent example of Ripple building compliance infrastructure rather than rethinking supply mechanics. That’s a deliberate choice about where to spend political and institutional capital.
Bigger Questions About What XRP Should Be
Underneath the escrow argument is a deeper disagreement about XRP’s identity. Morgan’s vision is essentially XRP as hard money — finite, fully circulating, auditable, no surprises. It’s a model that borrows from Bitcoin’s appeal without requiring proof-of-work. The idea is that removing the unlock schedule removes a psychological barrier for serious investors who want predictability baked into the asset itself, not just promised by a company.
Schwartz’s position, and Ripple’s by extension, is that the escrow system is a feature, not a bug. Institutional investors — the ones Ripple has spent years trying to win over — tend to like stable, predictable supply dynamics. They’re not necessarily looking for hard money in the Bitcoin sense. They want an asset where the rules are clear and the operator has a track record of following them. The escrow system, clunky as it might seem to some, has delivered that track record since 2017.
And that’s probably why Ripple isn’t rushing to change anything. The MiCA approvals didn’t happen because Ripple was unpredictable. They happened because Ripple spent years being very, very predictable.
Still, the community debate isn’t going away. Morgan keeps making the case. Schwartz keeps pushing back. And 32.74 billion XRP stays locked, releasing 1 billion at a time, on a schedule that won’t wrap up for nearly another decade.
Hub: XRP price, news, and analysis
Frequently Asked Questions
How much XRP is currently locked in Ripple’s escrow?
As of the latest figures, 32.74 billion XRP remains locked in escrow, with a distribution timeline spanning nearly nine years.
What is David Schwartz’s position on changing the escrow release strategy?
Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, opposes radical changes like burning escrowed XRP, citing Stellar’s token burn as an example where such moves didn’t produce lasting market benefits.
What does Bill Morgan want Ripple to do differently?
Morgan wants Ripple to relock less XRP each month after its scheduled releases, which would accelerate the timeline to full circulation and potentially position XRP as a hard money asset.
