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According to a quarterly report by Ripple, the San Francisco-headquartered company currently holds 4.682 billion $XRP tokens in its wallets.
On top of that, it also has 39.5 billion $XRP tokens that are subject to on-ledger escrow lockups.
Ripple initially introduced the escrow system back in 2017, locking away 55 billion tokens. The company unlocks a billion tokens on a monthly basis, according to its predetermined schedule. It is worth noting that Ripple also routinely re-locks some of its newly released tokens.
Earlier this year, Ripple CTO David Schwartz explained that Ripple's escrow tokens could be burned by "blackholing" the associated accounts. However, such a scenario seems to be far-fetched.
According to Schwartz, Ripple's original plan was to use giveaways, but they stopped being a viable option after the $XRP price gained a market price. "We tried a variety of other things such as sales with lockups and using $XRP to incentivize partners. And what we discovered was that everything that worked with more or less no different from selling $XRP," he added.
Key highlights from a recent report
According to Ripple's quarterly report, $XRP saw elevated volatility in the second quarter, with its realized volatility remaining above 90%. However, realized volatility ended up decreasing to 45% during the second part of the quarter.
Meanwhile, on-chain activity on the $XRP Ledger was substantially lower compared to the previous quarter.
During the second quarter, Ripple also revealed the name of its stablecoin and continued its long-lasting legal fight against the SEC.