How Much XRP Token Creators Have Cashed Out
Token creators cash out through exchange deposit tags, and those payments are on the public ledger. We measured every one we can attribute — then discarded 99.6% of the raw total, because almost none of it was token creators at all.
A destination tag identifies one account at an exchange. When a token creator sends XRP to one, the ledger records exactly where the money went — the venue, the account, the amount. We aggregated those payments across 15,982 token flow graphs covering 3,161 distinct creators.
The distribution is the story. The median creator moved 200 XRP — roughly a rounding error. Only 61 creators sent more than 10,000 XRP and 17 more than 100,000, with the largest single creator at 804,814 XRP. The 90th percentile is 7,341 XRP. This is not an industry of large exits; it is a very long tail with a handful of outliers.
Where it goes
Deposits are deduped per (destination, tag) pair, so a creator depositing fifty times to their own account counts once at the summed amount.
| Venue | XRP | Share | Creators | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kraken | 1,050,474 | 14.5% | 57 | |
| Binance | 1,022,450 | 14.1% | 88 | |
| Coinbase | 820,544 | 11.3% | 168 | |
| MEXC | 781,659 | 10.8% | 37 | |
| CoinEx | 558,645 | 7.7% | 5 | |
| HTX | 430,208 | 5.9% | 2 | |
| Bybit | 422,171 | 5.8% | 46 | |
| NDAX | 229,238 | 3.2% | 1 | |
| ChangeNOWinstant swap | 200,570 | 2.8% | 73 | |
| Uphold | 163,012 | 2.3% | 19 | |
| Bitrue | 161,703 | 2.2% | 26 | |
| Bitget | 121,899 | 1.7% | 14 |
Kraken and Binance take the most XRP, but Coinbase serves the most creators — 168 of them, more than double Binance — at a much smaller average size. Two venues are effectively one customer each: NDAX's 229,238XRP is a single creator on a single tag, and HTX's 430,208 XRP is two creators on three tags.
Instant swaps: small money, wide adoption
ChangeNOW, FixedFloat, SimpleSwap and SideShift need no account and no KYC, which makes them the obvious route for someone who does not want a cash-out tied to an identity. In XRP terms they are marginal — 213,711 XRP, 3.0% of the total.
| Service | XRP | Creators | Deposit tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChangeNOW | 200,570 | 73 | 304 |
| FixedFloat | 9,146 | 11 | 32 |
| SimpleSwap | 3,985 | 5 | 8 |
| SideShift | 10 | 1 | 1 |
By adoption the picture flips. 73 creators used ChangeNOW — the third-widest venue in the whole dataset, behind only Coinbase and Binance, and ahead of Kraken. They spread 200,570 XRP across 304 separate deposit tags, about four tags per creator, because a swap service mints a fresh tag for every order.
That per-order tag also breaks a technique that works everywhere else. Two wallets sharing an exchange deposit tag are normally the same person, since a tag identifies one customer. At a swap service a shared tag means only that two people used the same order slot, so it proves nothing about ownership.
How this was measured
The raw aggregate over all deposits in these graphs is 1.89 billion XRP. The figure above is 0.4% of that, because three exclusions were applied in order — each one removing more than it left.
1. Recipients, not just creators
The underlying breakdown mixes the creator's own deposits with those of every wallet the creator funded. Only rows whose sole depositor is the creator are counted here.
2. Creators that are exchanges
189 of 3,161 creators are themselves exchanges or services.Their deposits are treasury movement between venues, not a cash-out. Left in, the top ten “token creators” were BTC Markets, Bitfinex, OKX, Nexo, Bithumb, bitbank, Binance, KuCoin and Coinbase — 43.6% of the pre-exclusion total on their own. Identified by name, by receiving tagged deposits from 20+ senders, or by feeding 1,000+ distinct deposit tags.
3. Swap and bridge infrastructure
6 wallets moved 66,164,134 XRP— more than nine times the entire remaining total — and none is a token launcher. They include an unnamed instant-swap network hub and a cross-chain bridge. Any single “creator” above 1M XRP through deposit tags is infrastructure and is excluded.
Two further caveats. Amounts are total XRP sent to that deposit tag, which is not attributable to any one token — a creator who launched ten tokens has one cash-out history, not ten, and we count it once. And the destination filter keeps any account we hold a name for, which is mostly exchanges but not exclusively; a small number of named non-exchange destinations sit in the long tail below the table above.
Snapshot 2026-08-10. Derived from public XRP Ledger payment history. This describes wallet behaviour on a public ledger, not the identity or intent of any person. Related: how tokens are launched on the XRPL.