U.TODAY – In a recent discussion about the circulating range of XRP, CTO David Schwartz draws parallels with and the coins attributed to its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. His remarks highlighted the complexity of defining what constitutes “circulating supply” in the cryptol landscape.
An X-user had drawn attention to the difference in XRP’s circulating tender reported by the cryptoring platform CoinMarketcap and the popular XRP Upescan XRPSCAN.
CoinMarketcap reports XRP’s current circulating supply as 57.64 billion XRP, while XRPSCAN, according to a screen shared by the X user, reported 62.23 billion XRP.
In relation to this speculation, Schwartz explained, “How to measure circulating supply depends on what you consider to be circulating and what you do not consider to be circulating.” He continued: “For a Bitcoin analogy, Satoshi’s Bitcoins are circulating? Reasonable people may even disagree about which bitcoins are satoshis.”
Satoshi owned Bitcoin in the spotlight
The analogy made by Ripple CTO is particularly relevant as Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to own over 1 million BTC, which has remained untouched since Bitcoin’s early days. While these coins technically exist on blockchain, many in the crypto community believe that they are essentially out of circulation because of 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, which are subject to lock-out on the headbook, which will be released monthly over the next 42 months.
For this latter category, Ripple does not have access to this XRP until the deposit releases it to them every month. Each month, the remaining released XRP is returned to the deposit account.
