Ripple releases $1.38B in XRP; ex-CTO rebuts manipulation claims

Ripple released 1 billion XRP from escrow on May 1, 2026. The transfers were recorded as four on-chain transactions of 200 million, 300 million, 100 million and 400 million XRP, with the batch valued at about $1.38 billion at current market prices.

The release is part of an automated escrow mechanism the company put in place in December 2017. Under that system Ripple commonly returns between 70% and 80% of each monthly unlock to new escrow contracts, so the net amount entering circulation usually ranges from about 200 million to 300 million XRP.

Ripple states the escrow process is designed to provide transparency about supply and to manage liquidity for partnerships, institutional operations and ecosystem development. On-chain monitoring verified the May 1 transfers, and market participants commonly factor scheduled releases into pricing models.

David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO emeritus, wrote on X that theories claiming the company holds a secret tool to raise XRP’s price are no longer credible given regulatory review, public disclosures and operational changes. “Perhaps there was a time when one could semi-plausibly argue that Ripple had some easy way to massively boost the price of XRP forever… But boy, it’s hard to argue that today,” he wrote.

Schwartz addressed claims about services such as Ripple Prime and Treasury being used mainly to manipulate price, noting that if a small group of investors expected extreme future gains they would bid prices higher now. He also rejected proposals to burn the roughly 33 billion XRP remaining in escrow, citing a 2019 example in which a large token burn on another ledger produced no lasting price effect.

Schwartz wrote that wider adoption of XRP for cross-border payments, decentralized finance and other real-world uses is the path to sustained value rather than one-off actions intended to change the token’s price.