XRPL RLUSD Supply Drops 29% as Key XRP Trading Pool Reserves Remain Stable

While the reported supply of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) plunged nearly 29% in a single day, a key XRP/RLUSD trading pool showed remarkable resilience, losing almost none of its reserves. Ledger observations from late October 29 to October 31 revealed that the pool’s XRP balance declined by less than 1%, while its RLUSD holdings actually increased slightly.

This divergence is critical for XRP holders evaluating the liquidity and feasibility of trading into RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin. According to DefiLlama’s October 31 chain breakdown, the RLUSD supply on XRPL fell to 707 million tokens, representing a 28.7% drop over the displayed one-day window. Conversely, funded RLUSD offers available to XRP sellers rose in the sampled order book, though the buy-side capacity remained below its previous levels. At the October 31 market snapshot, XRP was trading near $1.25.

Although the pool’s inventory readings remained broadly stable, the funded order book exhibited asymmetric shifts on both sides. Nonetheless, subsequent estimates indicated that a 10,000-RLUSD order could still be fully executed in either direction.

NOSHASHI’s ledger analysis compared the same XRP/RLUSD pool at October 29, 23:59:51 UTC, and October 31, 13:11:11 UTC. This comparison relies on the absolute quantities of each token rather than dollar valuations, which are subject to volatility alongside XRP’s price movements.

Source: NOSHASHI’s October 29 closing-ledger reading and captured October 31 market observation. All timestamps are in UTC, 2026.

These specific pool balances did not reflect the scale of the overall supply reduction reported across the ledger. In the later observation, the pool still held approximately 1.87 million XRP and 2.34 million RLUSD.

Automated Market Makers (AMMs) allow traders to exchange assets directly against a pooled reserve of both tokens. As documented in the XRPL’s AMM specifications, a deeper pool generally absorbs a given trade size with minimal slippage, resulting in less movement in the exchange rate. Consequently, the actual balances within the trading pool are far more critical to execution quality than RLUSD supply sitting idle elsewhere on the ledger. XRP is directly committed when placed in such a pool, though it can also bridge between issued tokens when auto-bridging offers a more cost-effective route.

The supply dashboard and the market samples do not share an exact cutoff time. While DefiLlama exposes the date and the one-day change, it does not provide an intraday observation time or specific ledger for its supply window. Consequently, while the comparison spans the dates of the reported contraction, it cannot isolate the precise market response to individual issuance or redemption transactions.

Order Book Dynamics Diverge Across Trade Directions

While the AMM pool is a significant source of liquidity, it is not the sole avenue for trading capacity. The order book contained resting offers backed by actual, funded capital, with each side exhibiting distinct behavioral patterns.

For users looking to sell XRP in exchange for RLUSD, the relevant market depth consists of funded offers selling RLUSD for XRP. NOSHASHI’s capped sample recorded 62,952.98 RLUSD of these funded asks at the October 29 close. This figure grew to 98,461.88 RLUSD by the October 30 close, and further climbed to 112,162.55 RLUSD in the October 31 observation.

Conversely, users looking to sell RLUSD to acquire XRP interact with the opposite side of the book. Funded bids to buy RLUSD using XRP, expressed in RLUSD terms, fell from 71,292.22 RLUSD to 40,870.63 RLUSD between the October 29 and October 30 daily closes. While they partially recovered to 59,593.01 RLUSD by the October 31 sample, this level remained notably below the October 29 starting point.

This asymmetry highlights why the direction of the trade significantly alters the liquidity landscape. The captured order book offered increased RLUSD capacity to XRP sellers, whereas the available liquidity for RLUSD sellers had only partially recovered.

It is important to note the limitations of these aggregate totals. NOSHASHI’s book-depth analysis examined up to 100 offers per side within a 10% band of the contemporaneous reference mid—the midpoint used for comparison—while keeping AMM reserves separate. These totals do not guarantee that the entire amount could be traded near the best available price, especially as a shifting reference price alters the measured band.

A subsequent fixed-size estimate provides a more concrete execution example. At ledger 108023839, evaluated on October 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, representing a 0.14% premium above the reference mid. Conversely, selling 10,000 RLUSD would return 8,015.85 XRP, a 0.08% discount below that mid.

Both modeled hypothetical orders were fully fillable within the captured order book. These resting-offer estimates exclude the AMM pool and represent potential execution scenarios rather than actual trades or guaranteed quotes. Without an equivalent earlier estimate, they cannot definitively show whether execution costs decreased or increased in response to the RLUSD supply contraction.

Unresolved Factors Behind the Supply Decline

The exact drivers behind the XRPL RLUSD supply decline remain unresolved. Concurrently, DefiLlama showed Ethereum’s RLUSD supply near 1.71 billion, reflecting a 5.73% increase over its displayed one-day window. However, opposing chain trends do not confirm that funds directly migrated from XRPL to Ethereum.

On the XRP Ledger, returning tokens to their issuer destroys them and reduces ledger obligations. For a stablecoin, this process initiates redemption, though it does not independently verify that off-chain dollars have been settled. XRPL Dashboard’s net supply metric records changes in obligations rather than detailing separate gross mint and burn volumes. Furthermore, its supply fields lack a supply-specific ledger or precise observation time.

A transaction-level reconciliation would need to clearly identify issuance, returns, and any clawbacks, alongside the consistent treatment of operational wallets. While the issuer-balance API permits the exclusion of these wallets, the actual exclusion treatment applied by the dashboards remains unestablished. Consequently, available observations cannot distinguish between inventory consolidation, net redemptions, measurement methodology, or XRP selling as the underlying explanation.

Ripple’s issuer-wide transparency figures are earlier, reporting 2,627 million circulating RLUSD and $2,759 million in reserve funds as of October 29. These figures cannot be paired with October 31 chain supply as simultaneous observations. Additionally, issuer backing represents a separate inquiry from the immediate liquidity available to execute a trade.

For holders, the repeatable test remains the cost of executing the same trade size in both directions across subsequent ledgers, alongside monitoring funded offers and pool balances. A sustained reduction in these balances, or deteriorating comparable quotes, would alter this assessment. The captured pool balances did not show a proportionate loss alongside the reported supply decline; currently, the evidence does not establish an equivalent conclusion regarding execution quality across the broader XRP market.

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