Wealth advisor Mikul has been making waves with his bold claims that XRP's market capitalization is being manipulated to make it appear smaller than it actually is.
A prominent figure in the XRP community expressed this view in a recent video. Share Regarding X, Mikul argued that CoinMarketCap's calculation methodology is biased and significantly underestimates XRP's true market capitalization.
Mikul said CoinMarketCap calculates XRP's valuation by multiplying the token's price by its own “arbitrary” definition of circulating supply, which it sets at 56 billion XRP, which doesn't include the large amount of XRP currently held in escrow by Ripple.
“Because XRP is repeatedly moved in and out of escrow, XRP in escrow is not necessarily removed from the circulating supply; it is just not considered to be in circulation at any given moment.” Mickle explained.
He argues that nearly all XRP in existence has been in circulating supply at some point, and that tracking platforms are not justified in “leaving out” over 40 billion tokens when estimating XRP's valuation.
XRP should be second only to Solana
This topic has been a long-running discussion in the cryptocurrency community, but Mickle rekindled it amid recent news that XRP briefly surpassed USDC in market share. This happened over the weekend, when XRP rallied to $0.62 and hit a market cap of $34 billion, surpassing USDC.
Far from celebrating the milestone, community figures lamented that XRP’s limit should actually be higher than the figure presented.
In fact, tracking platforms like CoinMarketCap exclude escrowed XRP from their estimates of the token's market capitalization. Instead, they use the metric of “fully diluted market capitalization” to calculate the overall figure.
Mikul believes this is a deliberate move to misrepresent XRP's power, noting that other major cryptocurrencies do not face such “restrictions.”
He argued that CoinMarketCap counts all of Solana's supply, including that held by the Solana Foundation, regardless of whether it is actively traded or not. Mikul questioned why XRP was being singled out in this way, suggesting it could be a deliberate attempt to suppress its market cap and influence public perception.
“If you count all the XRP, the market cap of XRP would actually be around $62 billion.” Mickle argued: “Second only to Solana's $75 billion.”
However, it should be clear that CoinMarketCap is not counting Solana's entire supply in its valuation, which is a trend seen with most tokens that are tracked. It leaves out at least 117 million SOL tokens. If it were counted, Solana's cap would be $90 billion instead of $71 billion.
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