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Ripple’s most recent monthly XRP▲$1.13 unlock brought back an attention-grabbing headline. One billion unlocked tokens from Ripple’s escrow release on September 1. This time, however, XRP managed to hold its ground, perhaps reflecting a huge shift.
The release followed Ripple’s escrow timetable, established in 2017, when the company locked 55 billion XRP in time-locked contracts, and up to a billion XRP was released each month. The amount released, however, does not necessarily reflect the amount being put into circulation.
Historically, Ripple returned a sizable fraction of unlocked tokens to escrow and used the remainder for operational expenses, institutional sales, and market liquidity.
Thus, unlocks have lost their ability to surprise traders, as the frequency of unlocks is known in advance based on the fixed interval between unlocks and Ripple’s pattern of re-escrowing.
This proved correct in September, as XRP continued to trade above the pre-unlock price in the days following the unlock day, rather than dropping as holders had initially feared.
Outside of this, there are signs that the backdrop is different from earlier XRP market cycles, for example, strong price action and increasing XRP Ledger activity in August.
The same trend exists in active addresses, but payments show that fewer transactions, but larger XRP amounts, were moving around, so the growth in value was not simply a result of more retail transactions.
Ripple’s regulatory status shifted, too. In August 2025, Ripple and the US SEC dropped their appeals, concluding a multi-year court battle over XRP that left intact a ruling distinguishing between XRP’s trading in the secondary market and Ripple’s sale of the digital asset for institutional purposes, quelling a major uncertainty surrounding the token’s future.
Ripple has been bullish on institutional finance infrastructure in general, and has acquired prime brokerage, custody, treasury and stablecoin firms. RLUSD▲$0.9999 is another addition to Ripple’s payments ecosystem.
Instead, the company plans to build these services on cross-border settlement and institutional liquidity rather than speculative demand for XRP token.
The increased scale of this infrastructure probably goes a long way to explaining the death of the escrow narrative: monthly releases are compared to a much more liquid and much bigger XRP market, and institutional demand can be met much more easily.
Nevertheless, September unlock was a structural change, not an elimination of supply considerations. And while 1 billion XRP seems large, a major factor for how the market perceives the supply is how much of it is outside of escrow and whether it is absorbed into liquidity.
For XRP traders, the release has transitioned from a recurring shock to a known supply event whose impact depends on demand, liquidity, and market conditions at the time.
Source: <a href="https://<a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/is-the-bitcoin-bottom-in-2-analysts-say-yes-from-separate-charts/” title=”Is the Bitcoin Bottom In? 2 Analysts Say Yes From Separate Charts”>bitcoinfoundation.org/news/altcoins/xrp-defies-1-38-billion-ripple-unlock-as-institutional-demand-rewrites-the-market/” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow noopener”>bitcoinfoundation.org