Ripple has not ruled out permanently destroying the XRP it still controls, but company leaders and on-chain history suggest a token burn might not move markets the way some investors expect.
David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, pointed to a 2019 precedent from the Stellar Development Foundation, which burned 55 billion XLM—half of Stellar’s supply—without any obvious impact on price. Schwartz has argued Ripple could unilaterally prevent its locked tokens from ever entering circulation, and even replicate the economic effect of selling escrowed XRP simply by transferring control of the escrow account. CEO Brad Garlinghouse echoed a cautious openness, saying he “does not rule anything out” when asked about permanently destroying Ripple’s reserves.
Those comments come as Ripple completed its latest scheduled monthly escrow release on June 1, 2026, unlocking 1 billion XRP across three transactions tracked by Whale Alert. The largest transfer moved 500 million XRP (about $666 million), followed by 400 million XRP (~$533 million) and 100 million XRP (~$133 million).
Supply context: the XRP Ledger fixes total supply at 100 billion tokens. As of early June 2026, roughly 61.85 billion XRP were in circulation, leaving about 38.15 billion still locked in Ripple’s escrow holdings (Binance market data). However, the monthly billion-XRP unlock doesn’t mean a billion tokens hit markets. Ripple routinely re-escrows a large portion of what it unlocks and returns whatever XRP it expects it won’t need—effectively pushing the end of the escrow schedule further out and making it difficult to predict when the escrow will truly be emptied.
In short: burning Ripple’s remaining escrowed XRP remains on the table, but past experience and Ripple’s escrow-management practices suggest the market impact would be uncertain and potentially muted.
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