How many people currently own XRP?

XRP Ledger’s (XRP) key adoption metrics are showing a strong momentum for Ripple’s cryptocurrency. From a demand perspective, the XRP market capitalization has increased by more than $12 billion year-to-date, for an impressive 73% growth in 2023.

Similarly, the number of crypto wallet addresses holding at least 1 XRP ($0.55). Finbold filtered on-chain data from Santiment on October 27, which shows 4.82 million addresses own 1 XRP or more.

It is important to say that XRP Ledger is a pseudonymous network, and one single individual can control multiple addresses without a known link between them. Therefore, it is factually impossible at the moment to know how many people own XRP.

Notably, the retrieved data’s first register is from December 6, 2012, with a single XRP wallet owned by Ripple. This indicates an average growth of 438,180 per year in the last 11 years.

It is also notable that the pace of new wallet creation was comparatively slow until 2018 when we can observe a surge in the chart that continues steadily until 2021 for a meaningful hike leading to the current 4.82 million addresses who own XRP.

XRP population is similar to Afghanistan’s capital’s (Kabul)

Interestingly, if we considered the number of addresses as the XRP population, the number of people who own at least 1 XRP would be equal to capital cities such as Kabul in Afghanistan, with around 4.6 million population.

This XRP population holds around $29.48 billion in value considering XRP Ledger capitalization by press time, which is around $15 billion dollars higher than the $14.79 billion GDP of the whole of Afghanistan.

However, this capital is concentrated in an even smaller number of people who own XRP. It is well-known that one single entity usually owns more than one wallet address.

Besides that, data from CoinCarp indicates that the top 10 addresses own more than 11% of the entire supply available of XRP for approximately $3.24 billion worth of tokens. Top owners are distributed among Ripple and cryptocurrency exchanges.