Ripple Unlocks 1bn XRP as Bitcoin ETFs Close a Thin July

August opened with Ripple's scheduled escrow unlock and the closing tally on exchange-traded fund flows. We went to the ledger and the flow tables rather than to other people's coverage, and one number came back materially different from what is circulating.

What the ledger actually shows

Ripple's August unlock ran as three EscrowFinish transactions totalling 1bn XRP, all validated on 2 August at 01:22 UTC: 500m from one escrow account and 300m plus 200m from another.

The returns had already been prepared. Two EscrowCreate transactions on 1 August at 17:46 and 17:47 UTC put 700m XRP back into escrow — 200m and 500m respectively. Net release to Ripple: 300m XRP, the same as July.

That sequencing is worth noticing. The re-escrow transactions were created before the unlocks were validated, which is a reminder that the "1bn released" framing in headlines describes a mechanical step, not a supply event.

The escrow total is lower than reported

Querying the XRP Ledger directly for escrow objects held by Ripple's identified accounts returns 27,000,000,000 XRP across 85 escrow objects, as of validated ledger 106,032,765 on 2 August 2026. The balance sits in five accounts holding 5bn each, plus four holding 500m each.

Coverage this week has reported roughly 32.4bn. We are not asserting that figure is wrong — it is possible that escrow held in accounts outside the identified set is not captured by our query. But we can only publish what the ledger returns to us, and we would rather show our method than repeat a number whose derivation we cannot see.

If you see an escrow total without a ledger index or a date attached, treat it as unverified.

Bitcoin ETFs: what we could count ourselves

Farside's daily flow table was readable from 14 July onward; earlier rows were not retrievable. Summing the days we could read gives net inflows of $472.6m for 14–31 July.

The daily pattern shows why the month felt weak. After a strong run to 22 July, flows turned: −$225.1m on 23 July, −$240.1m on 24 July, then modest negatives through the 27th and 28th. The month ended with +$233.1m on 30 July wiped out by −$265.4m on 31 July.

Full-month totals reported elsewhere sit near $172m, which would imply meaningful outflows across 1–13 July. We have not been able to verify that figure from the source table and are not adopting it as our own.

For context that we can verify: June 2026 was a month of heavy outflows, and the direction reversed in July. Whether July was the weakest month on record is a claim we cannot check without the full table.

Ether funds ran ahead

Over the same 14–31 July window, Ethereum ETFs took in $234.7m by our count.

Set against bitcoin's $472.6m that looks smaller in absolute terms — but ether funds are a fraction of bitcoin's size, so proportionally the flow was considerably stronger. Reported full-month figures put ether ahead of bitcoin outright for the first time in 2026. Again, we flag that as reported rather than verified.

The Fed held, with hawkish dissents

The FOMC kept its target range at 3.5–3.75% on 29 July. The vote was 9–3, and the identity of the dissent matters: Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan each preferred to raise the range by a quarter point.

Dissents pushing for tighter policy are uncommon. Three of them in one meeting says the hawkish end of the committee has hardened rather than softened — which removes the near-term case for the liquidity conditions that drove the last crypto cycle.

CLARITY Act: still parked

Congressional records show H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, was ordered reported by Senate Banking on 14 May 2026 and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders, Calendar No. 423, on 1 June 2026.

No action has been recorded since. There has been no Senate floor vote, and with the August recess beginning, none is imminent.

Where this leaves the market

As of 2 August, exchange data put bitcoin at $63,158.80, ether at $1,870.22 and XRP at $1.0757. Live figures update continuously on our price pages.

The reading across all four items is the same: flows stopped collapsing without recovering, policy did not tighten further but did not ease, and the legislative overhang neither cleared nor worsened. Stabilisation, not recovery.

Sources

Every figure above comes from primary data or an official document. No news article was used as a source.

• XRP Ledger — escrow transactions and balances, via public JSON-RPC (account_objects, account_tx) at xrplcluster.com; Ripple account identifiers from the XRPScan well-known names endpoint. Ledger 106,032,765, 2 August 2026.
• ETF flows — daily tables at Farside Investors and ETH, as of 31 July 2026. July totals computed by us from the rows shown; 1–13 July was not retrievable.
• FOMC decision — Federal Reserve statement, 29 July 2026.
• CLARITY Act — Congress.gov, H.R. 3633 actions, record updated 11 June 2026.
• Prices — Kraken public ticker API, retrieved 2 August 2026.

Updated 2 August: escrow total corrected from 32.4bn to the 27bn returned by direct ledger query, and ETF figures replaced with our own computation from the source table.