Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse pushed back hard against a fresh XRP manipulation claim after the token slid to $1.77 before rebounding toward $1.88 during a choppy December. The move capped a 5% weekly drop. Even though XRP still trades in a higher range since Ripple’s courtroom win over the SEC.
The comments arrive in a market where new XRP futures, ETFs, and a Ripple-backed stablecoin are all reshaping how money flows around the beloved community asset.
Garlinghouse told CNN that “nobody is in a position to manipulate XRP prices.” he noted that XRP trades with multi‑billion‑dollar daily volume and tracks the crypto market rather than Ripple’s internal decisions. He said XRP is now too big and too liquid for one actor, Ripple’s backend included, to move it like a tiny micro‑cap coin.
Think of liquidity like the size of the swimming pool. A small bucket of water can change the level in a kiddie pool, but not in an Olympic one. Garlinghouse said low‑liquidity tokens are vulnerable to pump‑and‑dump games, but XRP’s scale makes that far harder.
According to CoinDesk, XRP futures volume alone recently ran toward $4 billion during a sharp move, which is not the profile of a thin, easily pushed market. Although it’s dropping now, so does the crypto market.
(source – Ripple Future Volume Today, CoinGecko)
He also emphasized that banks using Ripple’s payment technology purchase XRP on the open market, not through undisclosed sweetheart deals. These large buyers often agree to lockup terms so they cannot instantly flip all their tokens back into cash, which helps smooth out sudden dumps. For a beginner, this means institutional players usually face guardrails that you, as a small trader, do not see but still benefit from.
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One long‑running fear in the XRP community: Ripple owns a huge stash and might “dump” it on the market. Ripple now keeps around 34.4 billion XRP in escrow and 5.1 billion in spendable wallets, releasing 1 billion each month, then relocking most of it. That schedule informs you in advance how much XRP might enter the market, which is important because sudden selling is what usually scares prices the most.
(Source – XRPSCAN)
Garlinghouse said Ripple usually keeps only about 200 million XRP per month for operations and returns the rest to escrow. He admitted in an older Financial Times quote that Ripple would not be cash-flow positive without XRP sales, but he argued that those sales now follow a predictable and transparent pattern. As a beginner, you do not need to love that model, but you at least know the faucet is on a timer, not a random fire hose.
