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Wealth advisor Mickle stirs the waters with a bold claim that XRP’s market cap is being manipulated to make XRP appear smaller than it actually is.
The prominent XRP community figure expressed this perspective in a recent video shared on X. Mickle argued that CoinMarketCap’s calculation methods are skewed, claiming they lead to a significant underestimation of XRP’s true market cap.
According to Mickle, CoinMarketCap calculates XRP’s valuation by multiplying the token’s price by its own “arbitrary” definition of circulating supply, which it set at 56 billion XRP. This figure excludes a significant amount of XRP currently held in escrow by Ripple.
“XRP gets moved in and out of escrow repeatedly, meaning that the XRP in escrow isn’t necessarily excluded from the circulating supply—it just can’t be counted as circulating at any specific moment,” Mickle explained.
He asserts that almost every XRP in existence has been in the circulating supply at some point and that the “exclusion” of over 40 billion tokens by tracking platforms in estimating XRP’s valuation is not justified.
XRP Should Rank Just Behind Solana
While this subject has been an enduring debate in the crypto community, Mickle reignited it amid recent news of XRP briefly overtaking USDC in market share. This happened over the weekend when XRP rallied back to $0.62, commanding a $34 billion cap that surpassed that of USDC.
Rather than celebrating the milestone, the community figure lamented that XRP’s cap should actually be more than the presented figure.
Indeed, tracking platforms like CoinMarketCap exclude escrowed XRP from the token’s market cap estimation. Instead, they use “fully diluted market cap” metrics to account for the entire figure.
Mickle sees it as a deliberate act to misrepresent XRP’s might, pointing out that no other major cryptocurrency faces such a “restriction.”
He claimed CoinMarketCap counts all of Solana’s supply, including those held by the Solana Foundation, regardless of whether they are actively traded. Mickle questioned why XRP is singled out this way, suggesting it could be a conscious attempt to suppress its market cap and influence public perception.
“If every XRP were counted, XRP’s market cap would actually be around $62 billion,” Mickle asserted, “putting it just behind Solana at $75 billion.”
However, it is worth clarifying that CoinMarketCap does not count the entire supply of Solana for its valuation, a trend observed for most tracked tokens. At least 117 million SOL tokens are excluded. If counted, Solana’s cap would be $90 billion as opposed to $71 billion.