On the first day of every month, Ripple unlocks 1 billion XRP tokens from an escrow system using the XRP Ledger. On January 1 (Wednesday), the company will unlock over $2 billion worth of tokens in three transactions of 200 million, 300 million, and 500 million XRP.
Interestingly, January 2025’s unlock accounts for 1.74% of the current 57.25 billion circulating supply. Moreover, accrues for 2.63% of the remaining 38 billion XRP tokens locked in escrows under Ripple’s control.
Three escrows will reach finality in the last minutes of December 31, held by two known wallet addresses Ripple owns. In particular, ‘Ripple (24)’ will unlock 200 and 300 million XRP, previously locked in December 2020 and January 2021.
Second, ‘Ripple (25)’ will unlock 500 million tokens, previously locked in January 2021. These will be the last unlocks from ‘Ripple (24) and (25)’, but there are more escrows in other Ripple-controlled addresses.
This is what Ripple did to the 1 billion XRP unlock in December
We can look at previous monthly events as a reference to better understand what is next following this unlock. Notably, the escrow system unlocked 1 billion XRP on December 1. Later, Ripple re-locked 800 million of the total in escrows that will end by February 2028 in two accounts. Meanwhile, the remaining 200 million was reserved at ‘Ripple (1)‘ for further distribution.
The company then proceeded to sell the $500 million stash all at once, moving the amounts to other known and unknown accounts and selling more of the reserved XRP from ‘Ripple (50)‘ and Ripple (29)—all going unannounced.
Interestingly, the previous month, November, marked Ripple’s largest dump in seven years, selling 470 million XRP from the 1 billion unlocked from escrows. For that, the company sent 470 million XRP to ‘Ripple (1)’. These reserved tokens were later split and sent to ‘Ripple (50)’ and rP4X2h(…), as Finbold reported.
So far, in 2024, Ripple has sold 3.246 billion XRP from the ‘Ripple (1)’ reserve account alone, not counting movements from other accounts – as seen occasionally from ‘Ripple (50), (29)’, and more.
With XRP trading above the $2 mark, these sales represent more than $6.5 billion of selling pressure year-to-date. In comparison, the Ethereum Foundation has a yearly budget of $100 million for Ethereum (ETH) sales, which wasn’t reached.
As things develop, Ripple’s aggressive strategies impose a challenge for XRP’s growth, requiring a proportional demand increase for sustainability. According to Ripple’s Q3 2024 report, the company is using an On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) model, selling at market price to willing customers, which diminishes the economic effects of gigantic potential sell walls.
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