XRP Price Is Up Over 31,000% Despite Huge Ripple Sales

The commonly held perception about Ripple was, for some time, that Ripple’s selling pressure was preventing XRP from realizing its full market potential.

It’s a view so commonly expressed, particularly in online forums for traders, that it’s become somewhat of a cliché. It’s not questioned so much. However, if the facts are carefully looked at, nothing of the kind is found.

TheCryptoBasic shared a tweet that demonstrates how XRP’s value saw a massive surge of over 31,000 percent since the network’s development, yet more than 58 billion XRP, which was owned by Ripple and its insiders, was unloaded in the market.

• XRP Was Built Differently From Day One
• Putting Ripple’s Sales Into Context
• So What Actually Moves the XRP Price?

XRP Was Built Differently From Day One

XRP has always played a different game in its own right, unlike other cryptos, whether traditional like bitcoin or new ones based on staking instead of mining, XRP was launched back in 2012 with its full supply already created. It had 100 billion units available out of the gate, with no provision for creating more later on.

McCaleb, Britto, and Schwartz, the original creators of the XRP Ledger, distributed most of the XRP to what would later become Ripple. This amount of 80 billion XRP went to the company. The remaining 20 billion XRP was distributed among the founders and initial insiders. From the start, the 80 billion XRP to Ripple provided the leverage to control the circulating of the XRP cryptocurrency.

Putting Ripple’s Sales Into Context

For a long time, Ripple managed those holdings directly. Then in 2017, the company made a major change by locking 55 billion XRP into escrow, with up to 1 billion released each month.

The idea was pretty straightforward: make the supply predictable and ease fears about sudden, massive dumps hitting the market. Fast forward to today, and Ripple along with its executives now hold around 41.5 billion XRP.

That means roughly 58.5 billion XRP have been sold since 2012. At today’s prices, that would be worth well over $100 billion. And yet, during that same time, the XRP price moved from under $0.006 in 2013 to around $1.87 today, marking a gain of more than 31,700%.

That’s where the usual argument really starts to fall apart. If Ripple’s sales were truly crushing the market, it’s hard to explain how XRP still managed to grow that much over time.

Here’s How High Ripple’s XRP Price Could Go This Week_**

So What Actually Moves the XRP Price?

None of this means Ripple’s role should be brushed aside. Having a single company so closely tied to a token’s supply naturally raises questions about influence and market impact, and those concerns are completely fair.

But what the long-term XRP price action shows is that sales alone don’t tell the full story. XRP’s movements have clearly been shaped by a much wider mix of factors. Adoption, overall market cycles, regulatory developments, and investor sentiment have all played major roles along the way.

When you look at it from that perspective, the idea that XRP lagged simply because Ripple sold too much starts to feel overly simplistic. The data points to a more complex, and honestly more interesting, picture of how this market really works.