RLUSD Supply on XRPL Fell 29% in a Day, but a Sampled XRP Trading Pool Barely Changed

Data from the XRP Ledger shows the reported supply of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin contracting by almost 29% in a single day, yet one sampled XRP/RLUSD trading pool surrendered virtually none of its reserves. Between ledger observations recorded from Oct. 29 to Oct. 31, the pool's XRP balance slipped by less than 1%, while its RLUSD balance edged slightly higher.

The divergence matters for XRP holders assessing how easily they can convert into Ripple's dollar stablecoin. DefiLlama's Oct. 31 chain breakdown placed RLUSD on XRPL at 707 million tokens, down 28.7% over its displayed one-day window. Even so, funded RLUSD offers available to XRP sellers increased in the captured order-book sample, while the opposite side of the book remained below its earlier level. XRP was changing hands near $1.25 in the Oct. 31 market snapshot.

The two pool readings pointed to broadly similar inventory, even as the funded book moved differently on each of its sides. A later estimate indicated that a 10,000 RLUSD order could still be filled in either direction.

Reading the ledger, not the dollar value

NOSHASHI's ledger readings compared the same XRP/RLUSD pool at Oct. 29, 23:59:51 UTC and Oct. 31, 13:11:11 UTC. The comparison relies on quantities of each token rather than a dollar valuation, which would itself fluctuate with the price of XRP.

Source: NOSHASHI's Oct. 29 closing-ledger reading and captured Oct. 31 market reading. All times are UTC in 2026.

Those balances did not reflect the scale of the reported supply reduction. In the later observation, the pool still held roughly 1.87 million XRP and 2.34 million RLUSD.

An automated market maker allows traders to exchange against a pool that holds both assets. As XRPL's AMM documentation explains, a larger pool generally absorbs a given trade with less movement in its exchange rate. Actual balances therefore matter more to a pool user's execution than RLUSD sitting elsewhere on the ledger. XRP committed to such a pool is locked directly, and it can also bridge between issued tokens when auto-bridging offers a cheaper route.

The supply dashboard and the market samples do not share an exact cutoff. DefiLlama exposed the date and the one-day change but no intraday observation time or ledger for its supply window. The comparison spans the dates of the reported contraction; it cannot isolate the market's response to any single issuance or redemption transaction.

The order book told two different stories

The pool was only one source of trading capacity. The order book contained offers backed by funds their owners could actually provide, and its two sides moved in different directions.

For a trader selling XRP to receive RLUSD, the relevant offers are those selling RLUSD in exchange for XRP. NOSHASHI's capped sample showed 62,952.98 RLUSD of these funded asks at the Oct. 29 close. The total climbed to 98,461.88 RLUSD at the Oct. 30 close and then to 112,162.55 RLUSD at the Oct. 31 observation.

A trader selling RLUSD to acquire XRP faced the other side of the market. Funded offers to buy RLUSD with XRP, expressed in RLUSD units, dropped from 71,292.22 RLUSD to 40,870.63 RLUSD between the two daily closes. They recovered to 59,593.01 RLUSD by the Oct. 31 sample, still short of the Oct. 29 level.

That divergence explains why the direction of a trade changes the answer. The captured book offered more RLUSD to an XRP seller, while the capacity available to an RLUSD seller had recovered only partially.

The totals carry caveats. NOSHASHI's book-depth measurement examined up to 100 offers per side within 10% of the contemporaneous reference mid, the midpoint used for comparison, and kept AMM reserves separate. The totals do not imply that the entire amount could trade near the best price, and a moving reference price shifts the band being measured.

A later fixed-size estimate offers a more concrete illustration. At ledger 108023839, evaluated on Oct. 31 at 13:11:54 UTC, NOSHASHI's 10,000 RLUSD order-book estimate showed that buying 10,000 RLUSD would cost 8,033.58 XRP, 0.14% above the reference mid, while selling 10,000 RLUSD would return 8,015.85 XRP, 0.08% below it.

Both modeled orders were fully fillable in the captured book. These were resting-offer estimates that excluded the pool, not executed trades or guaranteed quotes. Without an equivalent earlier estimate, they cannot show whether execution became cheaper or more expensive as RLUSD supply changed.

Why the supply fell remains an open question

The reason for the decline in XRPL's RLUSD supply remains unresolved. DefiLlama simultaneously showed Ethereum's RLUSD supply near 1.71 billion, up 5.73% over its displayed day. Opposing chain-level changes, however, do not establish that the same funds migrated from XRPL to Ethereum.

On the XRP Ledger, returning tokens to their issuer destroys them and reduces ledger obligations. For a stablecoin, that step initiates redemption; it does not by itself prove that dollars have been paid out off-chain. XRPL Dashboard's net supply measure records obligation changes rather than enumerating separate gross mint and burn totals, and its supply fields lack a supply-specific ledger or observation time.

A transaction-level reconciliation would need to identify issuance, returns and any clawbacks, alongside consistent treatment of operational wallets. The issuer-balance API permits such wallets to be excluded, but the dashboards' actual exclusion treatment was not established. The available observations cannot distinguish between inventory consolidation, net redemption or measurement treatment as the explanation, nor can they identify XRP selling as a cause.

Ripple's issuer-wide transparency figures are from an earlier date: 2,627 million RLUSD circulating and $2,759 million in reserve funds as of Oct. 29. Those figures cannot be paired with the Oct. 31 chain supply as simultaneous observations, and issuer backing is a separate question from the funds available to execute a trade.

For holders, the repeatable test is the cost of the same trade size in both directions at subsequent ledgers, alongside funded offers and pool balances. A sustained reduction in those balances, or worse comparable quotes, would change the assessment. The captured pool balances showed no proportionate loss alongside the reported supply decline; the evidence does not yet support an equivalent conclusion for execution quality across the broader XRP market.

Source: CryptoSlate