Australian lawyer and prominent XRP community commentator Bill Morgan has been in the news headlines as he called on Ripple to relock less of its monthly 1 billion XRP escrow release. According to Morgan, accelerating the path to full circulating supply would establish XRP as a credible hard money asset and eliminate the supply overhang that continues to weigh on sentiment.
The argument is not new in outline, but the specifics of Morgan's framing push it into sharper territory, and Ripple's own CTO Emeritus has already drawn a clear line on how far the company is willing to go.
With 32.74 billion XRP still locked in escrow and the current release pace stretching the full-circulation timeline to roughly nine years, the structural math gives Morgan's argument its weight. The question the XRP community is now openly debating is not whether the overhang is real, but whether Ripple has both the incentive and the flexibility to compress that timeline.
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Ripple established its escrow system in 2017, placing 55 billion XRP into 55 separate on-ledger contracts, each releasing 1 billion XRP on the first of every month. The mechanism was designed to create a predictable, auditable supply and avoid an unannounced dump from a centralized treasury.
However, what it also created, by design, was an indefinitely extendable schedule: Ripple takes what it needs for operations and institutional distribution, then relocks the remainder into new contracts, effectively rolling the timeline forward month after month.
The logic is three-layered. First, relocking less shortens the nine-year horizon. Second, full circulation removes the psychological shadow supply that suppresses valuation. Third, a fixed, fully-circulating crypto supply is structurally more credible for institutional participants who price assets on known fundamentals rather than unknowable future release schedules.
It is worth noting that Morgan is looking for an argument. He has previously defended the escrow mechanism itself against claims that it is a deliberate price-suppression tool. He also pointed out that XRP ran from roughly $0.50 to above $3.00 between November 2024 and January 2025 while monthly releases continued uninterrupted. His current call is for faster completion of a process he considers legitimate.
Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has not endorsed acceleration, and he has flatly rejected the most radical version of the proposal circulating in the XRP community: burning the escrowed supply outright.