XRP entered 2025 with major headwinds, from regulatory clarity to ETF speculation, but attention is now shifting away from short-term price movements and toward a more uncomfortable question: who actually controls the supply?
Tracking XRP Scan data as of December 18, Ripple unsurprisingly still remains the largest XRP custodian, commanding a significant portion of the cryptocurrency’s supply in escrow.
More specifically, among the top ten XRP holders, Ripple accounts for eight positions, its escrow accounts collectively holding 45 billion XRP. In addition, the eight leading accounts hold about 1 billion XRP in balances.
The remaining two spots on the list are reserved for crypto exchanges Bithumb and Binance, which rank ninth and tenth, their accounts labeled “(12)” and “(5)” holding approximately 1.8 billion and 1.75 billion XRP, respectively.
The biggest unnamed holder is an address “rLD5k36bJkNk…,” with a balance of 1.2 billion XRP as of the time of writing. The second largest anonymous account, “ rJ9Ey7HbscSE…,” has a balance of “only” 713 million XRP.
Top XRP holder changes in 2025
Bithumb’s balance is the most notable change from last year, as the South Korean platform was not among the top ten. Rather, the spot number nine was occupied by another exchange, Uphold, whose account labeled “(8)” at the time boasted more or less 1.84 billion XRP.
For comparison, the Bithumb address was in charge of only 1.39 billion XRP, surpassing UPbit’s 1.22 billion and Coincheck’s 623.4 million XRP. In other words, Bithum’s holdings in this specific wallet have increased by 30% in a year. Over the same period, the above-mentioned Binance address saw its holdings drop ~1.5% from 1.83 billion to 1.8 billion.
In other data at the time of writing, the token has a maximum supply capped at 100 billion XRP, with over 7.41 million activated accounts currently holding or having held the asset. Of the total supply, approximately 99.99 billion XRP remain available, while 14.26 million XRP have been permanently burned through transaction fees.
As already mentioned, a significant portion of XRP remains locked in escrow, 34.48 billion XRP, to be exact. This leaves the circulating supply at roughly 65.49 billion XRP.
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