RLUSD supply fell 29% on XRPL. One XRP trading pool barely changed

XRPL's reported RLUSD supply fell almost 29% in a day, but a sampled XRP/RLUSD trading pool did not lose a comparable share of its reserves. Across ledger observations from Oct. 29 to Oct. 31, the pool's XRP balance slipped less than 1%, while its RLUSD balance increased slightly.

The contrast matters for XRP holders deciding whether they can trade into Ripple's dollar stablecoin. DefiLlama's Oct. 31 RLUSD chain breakdown showed 707 million tokens on XRPL, down 28.7% over its displayed one-day window. Yet funded RLUSD offers available to XRP sellers increased in the captured order-book sample. The opposite side of that book remained below its earlier level. XRP was trading near $1.25 in the Oct. 31 market snapshot.

The two pool readings showed broadly similar inventory, while the funded book changed differently on each side. A later estimate could still fill a 10,000-RLUSD order in either direction.

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 uses quantities of each token, rather than a dollar valuation that can also move with XRP's price.

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

Those balances did not mirror the scale of the reported supply reduction. The pool still contained about 1.87 million XRP and 2.34 million RLUSD in the later observation.

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

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

The order book gave different answers in each direction

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 differently.

For someone selling XRP to receive RLUSD, the relevant offers sell RLUSD in exchange for XRP. NOSHASHI's capped sample showed 62,952.98 RLUSD of these funded asks at the Oct. 29 close. That increased to 98,461.88 RLUSD at the Oct. 30 close, then 112,162.55 RLUSD at the Oct. 31 observation.

Someone selling RLUSD to acquire XRP faced the other side. Funded offers to buy RLUSD with XRP, expressed in RLUSD units, declined 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 below the Oct. 29 level.

This is why the direction of the trade changes the answer. The captured book offered more RLUSD to an XRP seller, while the capacity available to an RLUSD seller had only partly recovered.

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

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

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

What remains unresolved about the supply decline

Why XRPL's RLUSD supply fell remains unresolved. DefiLlama simultaneously showed Ethereum RLUSD supply near 1.71 billion, up 5.73% over its displayed day. Opposing chain changes 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 begins redemption; it does not itself prove dollars have been paid off-chain. XRPL Dashboard's net supply measure records obligation changes rather than enumerating separate gross mint and burn totals. Its supply fields also 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 those wallets to be excluded, but the dashboards' actual exclusion treatment was not established. The available observations cannot distinguish inventory consolidation, net redemption and measurement treatment as the explanation, or identify XRP selling as a cause.

Ripple's issuer-wide transparency figures are earlier: 2,627 million circulating RLUSD and $2,759 million in reserve funds as of Oct. 29. They cannot be paired with Oct. 31 chain supply as simultaneous observations. Issuer backing is also a separate question from 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 did not show a proportionate loss alongside the reported supply decline; the evidence does not yet establish an equivalent conclusion for execution quality across the wider XRP market.

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