Evernorth reports that XRP’s supply is now quickly shrinking and can’t be swept under the rug: Over 7 billion XRP were removed from centralized exchanges in February 2026, which was the largest removal since November 2025. In April, the Ripple-backed treasury firm detailed its argument in an extensively shared thread that included the same outflow figure, as well as information about whale purchases and record wallet participation by middle-sized wallets. The question asked was quite simple: Coins are not returning to the places where they are being sold.
It’s an interesting story, but it isn’t the end of the story. Some of the same on-chain analysts that track XRP for a living were far from impressed with how Evernorth interpreted the data, and the months since that thread left the internet gave the market a great opportunity to see if a supply squeeze really works like one is supposed to. So, here’s the actual report from Evernorth, why this report is so significant, where the pressure comes from, and what happened to XRP’s price after such a supply-shock talk went mainstream.
What Evernorth’s Data Actually Shows
Evernorth’s argument is based on exchange balance data from CryptoQuant. In February 2026, over 7 billion XRP was transferred off the exchanges Binance alone had transferred about 3.3 billion XRP, while most of the others were transferred by Bybit. It was the biggest monthly outflow in the market since November 2025, which, interestingly, was around the time that Evernorth itself bought up a considerable amount of XRP.
The reasoning behind the importance of this is not new. It has been a staple tool of on-chain analysts for years: people will usually deposit coins on an exchange before they want to sell, and take coins off an exchange before they want to hold. A consistent series of withdrawals reads more as a sign of panic.
There were two additional data points for Evernorth. The wallets belonging to the tier usually referred to as whales contributed approximately 3.4 billion XRP to their wallets during the same period, and were loading up at an average rate of 11 million XRP a day by early April. The number of mid-sized wallets (those with 1,000 to 100,000 XRP) reached an all-time high of ~1.1 million addresses, with the addition of ~520 million XRP over the same time frame, despite the XRP price dropping by approximately 50% over the same period. Evernorth’s lesson: not just a few large funds betting just one time. It’s piling up at almost all levels of wallet sizes, institutional, and, it seems, even regular retail investors.
Why Evernorth’s Opinion Carries Extra Weight
Evernorth isn’t a bystander number runner. It’s a digital asset treasury company that was created almost exclusively with the goal of XRP in mind, and is backed by Ripple itself as well as SBI Holdings, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and Arrington Capital. It now owns 473,276,430 XRP or 0.47% of all XRP, which is the highest number of public corporate XRP. It’s also been attempting to make that move to the Nasdaq under the new name XRPN via a merger with Nasdaq-listed Armada Acquisition Corp. II that was still pending SEC approval as of mid-August 2026, with a close scheduled for late Q3 or early Q4.
This background has both sides to it. There aren’t a lot of companies that are paying as much attention to on-chain flows of XRP as a company whose entire balance sheet is XRP. Meanwhile, Evernorth has a clear financial interest in providing a scarcity and demand narrative that’s the narrative that enables a SPAC deal to close and supports a stock price to stay up once listed. Another fact to be aware of is that Evernorth’s own average cost basis is around $2.44 to $2.54 per token, significantly higher than the typical price range of XRP during most of 2026, hence their own decision to adjust the terms of the Nasdaq deal in August to be tied to the price of XRP during the closing of the deal rather than the fixed $2.36 price reference used when it was first signed. None of this does affect the reliability of the outflow data. It is only important to know who you are reading the thread from.
Evernorth is no passive investor either. It has said that its strategy will involve lending XRP, adding liquidity, and managing yield strategies using Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in XRP Ledger-based decentralized finance pools, which means at least some of the supply it pulls off the market isn’t sitting idle, it is being put to work producing the returns the company requires to make the treasury model viable for its own backers. The timing of the thread wasn’t random, either. That was just as Ripple’s XRP Las Vegas conference began, with CEO Brad Garlinghouse in attendance, which is a little hard to believe for a company that’s in the middle of pitching itself to investors on the public markets.
What Leaving an Exchange Actually Means for Supply
Before giving much credence to any of this, it’s important to understand what an exchange balance really means. Functionally, XRP in a hot wallet, such as Binance or Coinbase, is the market’s liquid coins that are available and can be sold instantly to someone on the market. It is still real and still spendable, but now it requires whatever pushback the owner may wish between them and a sale: opening a separate wallet, finding a safe place to write down a seed phrase, moving the coins back onto an exchange, and then actually placing the trade. None of that is difficult. It’s not so much that it’s blatantly obvious as to be overly distracting, but it’s enough to make larger, sustained withdrawals a meaningful signal, rather than background noise.
The reason for every headline that reads exchange outflow is bullish, both for RYR and RRP, is that there is a basis in reality. Nor is it everything, as exchange balances can decline for a variety of other reasons, such as when an exchange restructures its custody, a market maker shifts its inventory, or a data provider simply fails to track the location of a given token. That is the general criticism raised by the XRP analyst community.
The Pushback: Not Everyone Buys the Supply Shock Story
Evernorth’s thread hit the ground running, and critiques quickly appeared from within the XRP community. Two on-chain commentators who follow the token closely challenged a complete picture of the situation.
Vet’s argument was about measurement, not motive. The data firm behind Evernorth’s numbers, CryptoQuant, doesn’t track every exchange that has XRP on its balance sheets, and its data for the aggregates is said to be strongly influenced by Binance data. Incomplete information like this can be summarised for a broad audience by tools such as AI assistants like Grok, and that can leave them with the misleading impression that the total number of XRP on exchanges is only 1 to 2 billion. Vet believes that the actual number is closer to 15-16 billion XRP across all venues and stated that, if measured from Christmas 2025, exchange balances have increased, they have not decreased.
The lack is significant, and it correlates with another noteworthy fact: Binance holds more than 30% of XRP’s circulating supply in its own wallets. A market that holds around a third of the float by one exchange does not necessarily mean that it is also a market with low supply of sellable coins. It’s a focus problem and not a shortage problem.
There is nothing to indicate that Evernorth was incorrect with the framing. Coins really did leave exchanges in February, whale wallets really did increase, and mid-tier wallets really did reach a record count. Whether the slice of data is enough to tell the whole story or just the slice that will make the more interesting headline, is the source of the disagreement.
XRP’s Price, Before and After the Warning
At the time of Evernorth’s thread on April 23, the rate of XRP was trading in a narrow range of $1.38 to $1.42, and the firm identified the $1.55 to $1.72 range as a resistance zone that a breakout would have to clear. It was also a structural catalyst for Coinbase: The Trade at Settlement feature for XRP futures will begin on May 1, which will allow institutional traders to buy and sell at the daily settlement time. The volatility in the outflow data, the whale accumulations, and a new piece of market infrastructure that had just hit the market in the week all looked like a textbook example of supply and demand math, as long as demand actually materialized to get a hold on the reduced flow.
It didn’t, at first. For the next few months, XRP continued to fall in tandem with the crypto market’s other altcoins. Strong inflows to the ETFs were cut back to a trickle by mid-summer. Whale wallets continued to pile more into XRP throughout the downtrend, which saw XRP trade at its lowest point since November 2024 on August 11, closing at $0.9952. By only tightening supply, price reductions were not prevented. Demand still had to show up.
Eventually, it did. As of the week of Aug. 25, XRP was up about 47% from its lows and trading in the $1.47-$1.48 range, holding a market cap of nearly $93 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency. The move coincided with a wider rally in bitcoin for its best week in about two years and major altcoins, supported by bond yields pulling back from fresh highs since 2007 and the U.S. Treasury’s decision to boost its long-bond buyback program. That macro backdrop had nothing to do with Evernorth’s thread from four months earlier. But a tighter float was ready to make it really sing when it did reach them.
What Actually Matters From Here
The lesson in all of those five months isn’t that Evernorth was right or that its critics were right. That’s because of the difference between supply and demand, and that squeeze only squeezes when the buyers show up to press the float. Both a real supply scenario and a real multi-month price drop were running concurrently, which is exactly what you’d expect if the supply side of the equation is genuine but not sufficient.
Here are some things to watch: A regular month sees 200-400 million net new tokens added to the circulating supply, a steady counterpoint to what whales are doing on exchanges, thanks to Ripple’s escrow system, which pumps up to 1 billion XRP a month, most of which is re-locked. Assuming that the listing on the Nasdaq is completed on time, Evernorth would effectively buy off another significant portion of supply, much like Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury changed the available supply of BTC. And a potential regulatory outcome whether the CLARITY Act will ever pass the Senate and make a final determination on XRP’s classification as a commodity is the type of catalyst real institutional demand could be waiting for, which none of the exchange-outflow charts can force.
No predictability here about the price that will result, and no one knows when, if ever, the actual supply pressure will appear in the chart, even Evernorth. But the last couple of months have proved that the supply side of this story is certainly worth following. It’s not, in itself, a prediction.
Staying Safe While the Whale Talk Heats Up
Whenever a token receives this kind of focus for whale purchasing and departure from exchanges, it also attracts folks who wish to make money off the hype dishonestly. As soon as a thread like Evernorth’s gets going, fake whale alert accounts tend to ramp up along with the search volume, as do cloned exchange login pages and messages about how to double your holdings.
The habits that will keep you safe here are simple. If someone emails you about XRP rewards, giveaways, or wallet verification, don’t trust it. If you’re taking all your coins into self-custody, following Evernorth’s example, as many large holders are doing, ensure that your recovery phrase stays off the internet and that you don’t enter it onto any website, regardless of how official it might appear. It is always better to scan your wallet first before sending to an unknown address, and it’s free to do so: a few seconds of checking is better than an irreversible transaction any time of day.
The data, whale wallets, and flow of exchanges are truly meaningful tools to interpret a market such as XRP’s. Just be aware of the noise around them and don’t let it fool you into thinking that the more mundane risks aren’t present every single time a coin begins trending.
This article is for informational purposes only and isn’t financial advice. The price of XRP and other cryptocurrencies has been volatile, and past price trends don’t necessarily mean that current trends will continue. Don’t do anything above without doing your own research first.
