U.Today – In a recent discussion of the circulating supply of XRP, CTO David Schwartz draws parallels to coins attributed to their mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. His remarks highlighted the complexities of defining what constitutes a “circulating supply” in the crypto landscape.
User X drew attention to the inequality in the circulating supply of XRP – reported by the Crypto Ranking platform CoinmarketCap and the popular XRP Explorer XRPSCAN.
CoinMarketCap reports the current supply of XRP as 57.64 billion XRP, while according to a screenshot shared by XRPSCAN, XRPSCAN reported 62.23 billion XRP.
Addressing this speculation, Schwartz explained, “How you measure circulatory supply depends on what you consider circulating and what you don’t consider circulating.” He continued: “For the Bitcoin analogy, did Satoshi’s bitcoins circulate? Reasonable people can even agree on which Bitcoins are Satoshi.”
Satoshi owned bitcoin in reflection
The analogy made by the Ripple CTO is particularly relevant given that Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to own more than a million BTC, which have remained untouched since Bitcoin’s early days. Although these coins technically exist on the blockchain, many in the crypto community believe that they are essentially out of circulation due to their inactivity.
According to CoinmarketCap, Bitcoin’s total and circulating supply is currently 19.81 million BTC, with a maximum supply of 21 million BTC.
Ripple’s XRP Holdings are divided into two categories: XRP currently available in its wallets, and XRP subject to escrow closures that will be released monthly over the next 42 months.
For this last category, Ripple does not have access to this XRP until escrow releases them monthly. Each month, the remaining XRP released is returned to the escrow account.
