Ripple’s XRP Claims about token burning have been wreaking havoc on the crypto community for a while. The fact that the claim in question was also shared by popular accounts was another detail that strengthened these claims. So how real are these claims? Here are all the known details.
Speculations on Investing.com RippleIt intensified with a fake news report suggesting that . was considering a large-scale burn of 41.9 billion escrow tokens. According to the fake news article, this move will be made due to the bearish performance of XRP in the market and the potential positive impact it could have on its price. Although no source was cited, the article quickly gained a lot of attention within the community.
As Koinfinans.com reported, Ripple executive Matt Hamilton recently suggested that Ripple could make XRP in escrow inaccessible, technically “burning” it by disabling the master key on the target account. However, he underlined that the entire process would take years.
In 2020, Ripple CTO and main architect of its software, David Schwartz, explained that XRP holders can choose to lock or destroy their tokens, but validators cannot simply delete tokens held in Ripple’s escrow. Any attempt by validators to go against Ripple and burn escrow assets could potentially bring the entire network to a halt.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse also stated that he is open to potentially burning the XRP tokens currently held in the company’s escrow, saying, “I am not ruling out anything.”
Although these news are fake, Ripple’s rival has already made a similar move. Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has burned more than 55 billion Stellar Lumens (XLM) tokens, amounting to approximately 4.7 billion USD.