Prominent $XRP commentator Bill Morgan has opined that San Francisco-headquartered firm Ripple should speed up the release of its escrowed tokens, which remain a hot topic of debate within the community.
Based on current distribution rates, Ripple’s massive stash of locked tokens could take nearly a decade to be fully emptied out.
Morgan argues that a swifter release schedule could actually unlock $XRP‘s true potential. “Ripple should release more of the 1 billion each month and not lock so much back in escrow,” Morgan shared on the X social network. “The sooner it is all released from escrow, and the circulating supply is 100% the quicker $XRP will become the best hard money.”
The escrow timeline
There are some estimates that some will take another nine years for the escrow to be completely used up.
However, calculating the exact day when it is going to happen is notoriously difficult: Ripple tends to re-lock varying sums of unspent tokens. The company retains only a small fraction for its institutional operations.
On the first of every month, Ripple unlocks exactly one billion $XRP tokens. For example, on June 1, the company unlocked one billion tokens across three separate transactions that were valued at over $1.33 billion at the time when they were being performed. A substantial portion of these tokens ended up being re-locked.
Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer Emeritus David Schwartz has previously confirmed that the firm voluntarily returns whatever $XRP it does not need or use.
Approximately 61.85 billion $XRP tokens are currently active and liquid in the global market.
Ripple’s remaining locked escrow balance sits at roughly 38.15 billion $XRP.
As reported by U.Today, Ripple’s Schwartz previously rejected the idea of burning the company’s $XRP escrow as inefficient, citing Stellar’s example (XLM experienced only a short-term price boost).
