XRPL Validator Vet Explains Why It Is Impossible to Create More XRP Tokens Beyond the Initial Supply of 100 Billion Tokens

Amid recent discussions, several critics now claim Ripple has the power to create more XRP beyond the original 100 billion.

XRPL validator Vet has countered claims that Ripple can still create more XRP beyond the original 100 billion.

In an X post on Thursday, Vet, a decentralized unique node list (dUNL) validator for the XRP Ledger (XRPL), addressed recent statements from Bitcoin maximalists regarding the possibility of additional XRP being created.

“100,000,000,000 $XRP were created with the genesis account over a decade ago,” the validator began.

“However, some believe that additional XRP could be issued,” he added before proceeding to explain why this is not possible.

According to Vet, the entire XRP supply was created in 2012 when the XRPL went live. The genesis account, which initially held all XRP, is hardcoded into the ledger, and its cryptographic keys are available to the public. This ensures transparency, as anyone can verify the original XRP supply.

The XRPL design prevents the creation of new XRP at all times, Vet noted, adding that the ledger allows anyone running a node to check the total XRP supply at any given block using the network’s built-in ledger command.

“This means that the system monitors every transaction, and if a bug were to ever attempt to generate new XRP, the system would block it immediately,” he explained.

An important safeguard within the XRPL is the “invariant checker,” a security feature coded into the system that continuously checks all transactions to ensure no new XRP is being created, the validator noted.

“Unlike Bitcoin, which has experienced accidental inflation due to bugs in the past, the XRPL has never had such an issue,” Vet said, referring to the 184 billion BTC bug that led to the creation of 184 billion BTC in August 2010.

The validator also reminded the community that XRP is actually deflationary. Every transaction burns a small portion of XRP as a fee, reducing the total circulating supply over time. Because of this, the number of XRP in existence is only decreasing — not increasing.

Vet's commentary comes on the back of claims from Pierre Rochard, a Bitcoin maximalist and VP of research at Riot, who argued last week that Ripple could still issue trillions of additional XRP.

On Jan. 26, Rochard alleged that Ripple could fork XRPL software to remove existing supply restrictions or alter escrow locks and that the firm had misled the public about XRPL’s decentralization.

“There are no ‘alternative publishers’ of XRPL's rules. This is a critical point that Ripple has tried very hard to obscure,” Rochard claimed, suggesting that Ripple and its affiliates control XRPL.

He went on to compare XRP's scarcity to that of fiat currency, which governments can print at will, to suggest that XRP's scarcity is an illusion.

In response to Rochard's claims, Ripple CTO David Schwartz argued that any blockchain, including Bitcoin, can be forked, but simply forking a blockchain does not force anyone to adopt the new version or change the functionality of the original version.

“And anyone can trivially fork the bitcoin software to remove the 21 million bitcoin limit. That's how decentralized systems work — anyone can change them for any, and only, people who choose to run the changed code,” Schwartz said, adding that Rochard's argument could also be applied to BTC.