Nearly two years after cryptographically placing 55 billion XRP in escrow, Ripple now has just over 50 billion left.
The latest update on Ripple’s website shows the company has 50,000,000,013 XRP locked up, to be exact.
Ripple first sent the original 55 billion into escrow in December of 2017 in an effort to ensure investors that it won’t sell all of its holdings at once.
Each month, the company releases 1 billion XRP, sells a fraction, and returns the rest back into escrow.
In addition to the escrowed XRP, the San Francisco startup also holds an additional 6,743,225,077 in its coffers.
Since the inception of the XRP Ledger back in January of 2013, about 43,248,091,671 XRP have been distributed to entities other than Ripple.
In its third-quarter XRP Markets Report, Ripple said it sold $50.12 million directly to institutions and $16.12 million on crypto exchanges.
Those numbers represented a steep decline from the previous quarter, when Ripple sold $160.87 to institutions and $144.64 to crypto exchanges.
“In Q3 2019, three billion XRP were again released out of escrow (one billion each month). 2.30 billion XRP were returned and subsequently put into new escrow contracts.
The majority of the unused portion of the 700 million XRP not returned to escrow was being held in operating wallets at the end of the quarter. All figures are reported based on transactions executed during the quarter.”
Ripple says it plans to continue selling its holdings at a similar pace this quarter.
