The Ripple XRP Freeze Gap Emerges as RLUSD Supply Nears $2.5Bn

Ripple XRP traded around $1.52 on Monday, September 28, down about 2.8% over 24 hours but still up about +1% for the week, according to CoinGecko data.

Two developments are moving through the XRP ecosystem this week: the hacker behind Bitget’s breach has moved about $83M in stolen XRP out of the original holding wallets, and Ripple’s dollar-pegged token RLUSD has pushed its circulating supply toward $2.5Bn.

Both stories turn on the same underlying distinction: what can and cannot be frozen on the XRP Ledger, and they land in the same week for very different reasons.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has shared the first findings from the investigation into the $351.6M attack.

• Private keys were NOT compromised — attackers reportedly gained access to Bitget’s internal systems.

Nearly 103 million XRP was taken from Bitget and divided into five holding accounts, according to CoinDesk. By Saturday, two wallets with 20 million XRP each had only 23 and 55 tokens left, while a third held about 5.8 million XRP.

About $75M remained across the accounts, but later checks showed about $54M had already been transferred elsewhere, suggesting the attacker was spreading the stolen funds.

Ripple faces a challenge since XRP, as the network’s native asset, cannot be frozen like tokens issued on top of it. Recovery depends on where the coins end up; exchanges can restrict withdrawals but can’t touch coins in the attacker’s wallets.

It is not necessary to be a certified cult member to be an interested owner of a crypto $XRPThe charts alone have always been enough reason for us to make a betThere is a difference between being open minded and having a hole in the dead pic.twitter.com/YAnP0GGBBV

This incident highlights exchange wallet infrastructure issues rather than flaws in the ledger itself. Bitget stated its protection fund would cover the total loss of roughly $387.5M, and withdrawals would resume in stages from Sept. 28 through Oct. 2.

At $1.54, the stolen XRP was worth about $160M, around 4% of the token’s daily trading volume of $4.4Bn. The large transfers suggest the attacker is redistributing the stolen coins, though it’s unclear how much has been sold.

Away from the hack, the Ripple XRP stablecoin business kept growing. DefiLlama data places RLUSD’s circulating supply at approximately 2.49 billion tokens, up from the $2Bn milestone Ripple reported crossing in August. Because RLUSD trades pegged near $1, that increase reflects more tokens in circulation rather than any price appreciation.

That 2.49 billion figure spans every network where RLUSD is issued, and it should not be confused with the smaller pool sitting on XRP Ledger specifically.

DefiLlama, cited in the same report, put total stablecoin value on XRPL at approximately $1.19Bn, up roughly 6% over seven days and 11% over 30 days, with about $1.10Bn of that, more than 92%, accounted for by RLUSD alone.

RLUSD launched in December 2024 on both XRP Ledger and Ethereum, and it now looks like a payments-and-treasury product growing largely independent of XRP’s own price action, even as new user growth on the ledger has stalled in recent tracking.

More RLUSD on XRPL can generate additional network fee activity paid in XRP, but nothing in the available data shows stablecoin holders converting into equivalent XRP demand.

The two figures, total RLUSD circulation and RLUSD held on XRPL, describe different things, and conflating them overstates what the growth actually means for XRP itself.

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Alex is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and market analyst with over seven years of active experience in the digital asset space. Since entering the markets in 2017, Alex has specialized in identifying emerging "meta" trends and high-volatility narratives. Notably, Alex... Read More