About XRP
What is XRP?
XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The ledger has a deliberately narrow goal: move value quickly and cheaply, and stay up. New ledger versions come from neither mining nor staking, but from a set of independent validators voting on the contents of the next version, confirming roughly every three to five seconds. The usual separation still applies: XRP is the asset unit, fiat is the quote unit, and an exchange print is one market at one moment.
The entire supply was minted at launch
XRP’s supply mechanics differ completely from block-issued assets: all 100 billion XRP were created when the ledger launched in 2012, and the protocol mints none since. The minimum fee on every transaction is instead burned permanently, so total supply drifts slowly downward. Most of the XRP Ripple holds sits in on-ledger escrow that unlocks in monthly tranches, which is the main driver of changes in circulating supply and the context worth holding when reading that figure.
The consensus design sets the risk surface
With no hash-power race and no slashing, XRPL security rests on the independence of validator lists: participants must agree on a sufficiently overlapping set for consensus to form. That buys low latency and a long uninterrupted operating record, at the cost of making decentralisation a function of how those lists are composed. Validator distribution and the escrow release schedule matter more here than block difficulty.