XRP measured against Bitcoin

Bitcoin's design intent is a settlement network whose supply rule is fixed and whose validation is open to anyone with commodity hardware. Issuance is the reward for finding a block, so new supply enters circulation only through work, and the schedule that governs it is written into the consensus rules. The supply schedule page sets out how that works.

The XRP Ledger was designed for a different job: fast, cheap settlement of value transfers between parties, including currencies other than XRP. Its consensus protocol is not proof of work. A rotating set of validators, currently operated by a mix of independent operators and Ripple itself, agrees on the ledger through a multi-round voting process, and the ledger closes in a few seconds. There is no mining, so there is no issuance reward and no energy expenditure securing the chain.

That difference has a direct consequence for supply. All 100 billion XRP were created in the ledger's genesis state. No new XRP is produced by consensus. The supply question for XRP is therefore not an issuance schedule but a distribution schedule: how much of the genesis supply is held by the founding company, how much is locked in escrow, and how much is in circulation. Ripple's markets reports disclose the escrow balance and the monthly release, and the company has stated that released amounts not used for sales are returned to escrow. The mechanism is documented; the policy behind it is a company decision rather than a protocol rule.

XRP's market history is punctuated by legal and regulatory events in a way that Bitcoin's is not. The most consequential is the US Securities and Exchange Commission's action against Ripple Laboratories, filed in December 2020, which alleged that sales of XRP constituted unregistered securities offerings. The litigation ran for several years, produced a contested summary judgment in July 2023 on the question of institutional sales, and was resolved by settlement in 2025. Alongside it, several large venues suspended XRP trading in late 2020 and reinstated it at various points afterwards.

These events are documented and dated, and they are part of the record. What this page will not do is attribute a specific price move to a specific filing. The reason is methodological rather than diplomatic. A legal event and a price move can be simultaneous without one causing the other, and in a market where the same week contains a macro rate decision, a venue listing change and a litigation headline, the price record cannot assign credit among them. The distinction between correlation, association and timing is the one that matters here: the timeline is associated with periods of unusual volatility, and that association is not evidence of causation.

The honest statement is narrower and more useful. XRP's price history contains episodes where a large share of the asset's float was affected by venue access decisions, and venue access is a market-structure variable rather than a fundamental one. That makes the asset's record harder to interpret through a common-factor lens than Bitcoin's, because the set of venues quoting it changed over time. The liquidity page explains why a change in the venue set changes what a price series means.

The most defensible way to describe XRP against Bitcoin is by phase rather than by number. Across Bitcoin's completed cycles, the XRP/BTC ratio has tended to compress during the late stages of a Bitcoin advance and to expand during the early stages of a recovery, when capital rotates outward from BTC into the rest of the market. That pattern is visible in the record and is consistent with a rotation story, but it is a description of co-movement, not a mechanism. The cycle comparison page sets out the phase dates this description rests on.

Two caveats apply to any such reading. First, the rotation pattern is not uniform: there are periods where XRP and BTC fell together and the ratio barely moved, which is what a common market factor looks like rather than a rotation. Second, the sample is small. Bitcoin has completed a handful of cycles, and XRP has been liquid for fewer of them than BTC has. A pattern observed across four or five observations is a description of those observations, not a generalisation.

The drawdown record is the other place the two assets diverge in character. Bitcoin's declines are documented in the drawdown reference. XRP's largest decline, from its early-2018 peak, was deeper and longer than any Bitcoin drawdown in the same window, and the asset spent several years below its prior high. That is a statement about the record, and it is the kind of statement this page is willing to make, because it can be checked against the price series.