Foreign media reported that crypto lawyer Bill Morgan recently stated that one of XRP’s most notable advantages is the escrow mechanism Ripple established early on the XRP Ledger. This arrangement makes it easier for the market to assess the token release schedule and helps alleviate concerns regarding large-scale holdings distribution.
The custodial balance continues to decline
Morgan believes that understanding XRP’s custody structure reveals why it has maintained long-term market appeal, with other feature updates building upon this foundation to add further value. He notes that Ripple manages a large volume of XRP through custody, partly to stabilize market expectations.
According to XRPScan data, approximately 32.445 billion XRP are currently held in custody, with a circulating supply of about 67.526 billion XRP. Morgan also noted that about a year ago, the proportion of XRP held in custody was close to 36% of the total supply.
Currently, this ratio has dropped below 32.5%, with the total available supply at approximately 99.986 billion XRP. This is because Ripple continues to unlock 1 billion XRP monthly but does not re-lock approximately 300 million of them back into escrow. At this rate, the escrowed percentage could fall below 29% by July next year.
The XRPL upgrade vote has not yet reached the threshold.
In addition to the custody-related topic, a repair upgrade for the XRP Ledger is currently underway. According to the latest data from XRPScan, the fixCleanup3_2_0 amendment currently has 40% support, still significantly below the 80% threshold required to enter the activation phase.
This amendment is part of the XRPLD 3.2.0 release and is primarily intended for cleanup and maintenance of existing functionality. It covers modules including single-asset vaults, lending protocols, permissioned DEXes, multi-purpose tokens, and permissioned domains.
The repair focuses on accuracy and verification.
The disclosed updates highlight fixes for precision and rounding issues in single-asset vaults and lending protocols, as well as corrections for validation errors triggered when removing valid quotes on permissioned DEXs.
In addition, the amendment introduces validation for the number of non-compliant utility tokens and checks for zero DomainID in permitted domains. The new version also adds a constraint called AccountRootsDeletedClean to ensure that no directly accessible on-chain objects remain after account deletion.
Another recent development is that the x402 facilitator on the XRP Ledger has settled nearly one million proxy transactions, indicating continued growth in the usage of related on-chain tools.