Forbes and CoinMarketCap Disagree Over XRP’s Circulating Supply

The debate could see $20 billion added to XRP’s market cap if Forbes has its way.

The nature of the supply associated with Ripple’s XRP has long been debated, and now it looks like major cryptocurrency market tracking sites are in disagreement over the circulating supply of the world’s highest-valued altcoin.

@Ripple We have updated the circulating supply for #XRP on https://t.co/bvxSlP8wMo

— Forbes CryptoMarkets (@ForbesCryptoMkt) December 4, 2018

On Tuesday, Forbes made waves across Crypto Twitter when it announced that it had updated the circulating supply of XRP to equal the max supply of 99,991,780,039 — effectively giving XRP a market capitalization of $33.6 billion.

In response to the tweet, a flurry of comments called out CoinMarketCap, which is currently the leading market tracking site, for only having XRP’s circulating supply at 40,327,341,704 — equating to a $13.65 billion market cap.

CoinMarketCap quickly responded to the situation by emphasizing the fact that it currently pulls supply data directly from Ripple’s network stats and that the distributed portion of the XRP supply is what is used for the circulating data point.

The circulating supply data we are reporting for XRP is directly from the Ripple network stats. The “distributed” portion of the XRP supply is what is currently in circulation. The “undistributed” portion of XRP is not circulating as indicated by Ripple. https://t.co/jTcjaQg7gX

— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) December 4, 2018

Ultimately, this debate highlights the difference between a cryptocurrency’s market cap based on circulating supply and its diluted market cap based on the potential total supply, which can be fairly significant when a large premine is in play. Some would argue the diluted market cap of a stock or cryptocurrency provides a “reality check,” forcing investors to examine the asset’s actual value.