Key Takeaways
- Bill Morgan wants Ripple to reduce XRP re-locking and speed up escrow releases.
- About 38.15 billion XRP remains in escrow, with full distribution potentially years away.
- Ripple argues predictable escrow releases provide stability and institutional confidence.
Roughly 38.15 billion XRP remains locked inside Ripple’s programmatic escrow system, and a legal expert Bill Morgan wants that number to fall faster.
In a post on X on June 21, Morgan urged Ripple to release more of its monthly billion-token unlock and return less to escrow each cycle, arguing that reaching full circulating supply sooner is the clearest path to establishing XRP as what he called “the best hard money.”
How the Escrow Works
Ripple locked 55 billion XRP into escrow in 2017 as a mechanism to give the market predictable visibility into future token supply. One billion XRP is released on the first day of every month across scheduled contract expirations.
Ripple then decides how much of that release to deploy for operations, institutional activity and liquidity needs, with the remainder returned to new escrow contracts at the back of the queue.
Some estimates suggest the current pace could take nearly nine years to fully distribute the remaining escrowed XRP, though determining an exact timeline remains difficult since the amount re-locked changes from month to month based on Ripple’s internal business and treasury needs.
After the June 1 unlock, roughly 61.85 billion XRP was in circulation against 38.15 billion still locked.
Morgan’s Argument
Morgan’s case rests on supply transparency and the institutional narrative around hard money assets. A fixed, fully circulating supply removes the uncertainty that scheduled future releases create for investors pricing XRP. As long as a significant portion of total supply remains in escrow controlled by a single corporate entity, XRP carries an overhang that Bitcoin and other capped-supply assets do not.
“Ripple should release more of the 1 billion each month and not lock so much back in escrow. The sooner it is all released from escrow and the circulating supply is 100%, the quicker XRP will become the best hard money,” Morgan wrote.
His argument does not call for burning the escrowed supply, which Ripple has explicitly rejected, but for a faster drawdown through reduced monthly re-locking.
However, not everyone in the XRP community shares Morgan’s view, and the objections split along predictable lines.
Even Ripple’s own position has historically emphasized that the escrow system serves a stabilizing function. The company has pointed to the predictability of monthly releases as a feature that institutional partners value, since counterparties can model Ripple’s supply schedule without uncertainty.
Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has publicly rejected proposals to burn the escrow reserves, citing Stellar’s token burn as an example of a measure that produced only short-lived market effects.
Ripple’s Business Separation Complicates the Picture
The escrow debate is playing out against a backdrop where Ripple is actively separating its corporate revenue story from XRP’s supply dynamics.
CEO Brad Garlinghouse has said the company expects to end 2026 with a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, a figure that explicitly excludes XRP held on Ripple’s balance sheet. Ripple’s operating business is growing through stablecoins, custody, treasury tools and payments, while XRP still trades on supply, demand and market sentiment.
That separation is relevant to Morgan’s proposal because it implies Ripple’s operational need to deploy escrowed XRP for business purposes may be declining relative to earlier years when ODL corridor expansion required larger token deployments.
If Ripple’s non-XRP revenue lines are scaling, the operational justification for holding large monthly reserves back in escrow becomes harder to defend publicly.
XRP traded near $1.08 at the time of writing, with buyers defending the $1.10 support area and sellers capping moves above $1.20. The token has struggled to build strong momentum despite Ripple’s wider business activity.
Whether Ripple moves to accelerate escrow releases in response to community pressure, or maintains its current measured distribution model on the grounds that predictability outweighs the hard money narrative, is the question Morgan’s post has put back on the table.
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Dr. Guneet Kaur is a senior editor at CCN.com and a Science Fellow at Exponential Science. She is a fintech and blockchain expert with extensive experience in digital finance education, blockchain ecosystems, and cryptocurrency markets. She has worked with global media such as Cointelegraph, as well as education and blockchain platforms, to design and lead strategic content and learning initiatives. As an educator and assessor for top-tier executive programs, she bridges real-world fintech trends with academic insight.
Dr. Kaur is also a published researcher and peer reviewer across fintech and data science journals, including Financial Innovation Journal and International Journal of Big Data Intelligence and Applications. Her work spans data-driven analysis, Web3 innovation, and technical content development. With a strong foundation in both industry and academia, she translates complex financial technologies into practical applications, empowering learners, professionals, and institutions across the rapidly evolving digital finance landscape.
