Ripple: Who owns the most XRP?

Who are the people who own the most XRP, Ripple’s cryptocurrency? 

Firstly, it must be said that all existing XRP tokens have already been created, which means that XRP tokens are not mined and no new ones are created. 

About 100 billion XRP tokens have been created in total, but there are currently only just under 44 billion XRP tokens in circulation. The rest are being made available to the Ripple company at a rate of one billion per month, although the company itself does not always use all of them, and some of them can thus be locked back into the reserve. 

Consequently, the largest holder of XRP tokens is Ripple. 

So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s largest XRP owners include the founders and several of the company’s top executives. 

For example, according to what Forbes reveals, it seems that Chris Larsen, co-founder and former CEO of Ripple until November 2016, held a little more than 5.1 billion XRP, equal to about 1.1 billion dollars, in addition to a 17% stake in the company itself. 

Thanks to this heritage, Larsen ranked 15th overall among the richest Americans on the Forbes 400 list in 2017, with a wealth similar to that of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and current owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. In 2019, however, he dropped to 388th position in this prestigious ranking. 

The current CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, also owns a lot of XRP, although Forbes does not reveal how many. In addition, Garlinghouse owns 6.3% of Ripple’s shares, making him the 54th richest American on the Forbes 400 list in 2017. In 2019, Garlinghouse is no longer on the Forbes 400 list. 

Even the co-founder of Ripple Jed McCaleb, now CTO of Stellar, possesses large amounts of XRP: in the past, he declared to have donated 2 billion to a fund, while in February 2016 he had 5.3 billion deposited with Ripple which are paid to him on a monthly basis in a small percentage. 

There is no other precise information on who the other large XRP owners are, although there are some statistics that reveal, for example, that there are only 14 addresses with more than 500 million XRP, of which only 6 with more than one billion. 

However, as with other cryptocurrencies, a single person may own several addresses, so it is not possible to use this data to hypothesize how many other people own large sums of XRP.