cbXRP grew 5.5x: 78% lives in a lending contract

91,618,969 of the 117,288,396 cbXRP in existence—78.1%—are deposited within a single lending contract. cbXRP is the receipt Coinbase issues on Base (its Layer 2 network on Ethereum) for every XRP a user deposits into custody, and its supply has increased 5.5x so far in 2026 while the price of XRP fell. The token's largest holder is not an exchange, nor a liquidity pool, nor a treasury: it is the Morpho Blue singleton contract—the lending protocol where each market is defined by an asset pair and a fixed liquidation threshold—and within it, a single cbXRP/USDC market created on January 15, 2026, concentrates 99% of that balance. That market liquidates at 62.5%, exactly the threshold Coinbase published on February 18, 2026, when it began accepting XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC as collateral for its USDC loans. The following reconstructs who is driving the demand sustaining a wrapper when all signs point to the token issuer also being its primary consumer: the monthly supply series, the contract-by-contract concentration of the second wave (cbXRP, cbDOGE, cbADA, and cbLTC, launched in June 2025), the contrast with cbBTC, and three signals to re-verify it.

Who holds the 117 million cbXRP in existence?

The cbXRP contract on Base records 117,288,396 units and 49,867 holding addresses as of August 24, 2026; Coinbase's proof of reserves publishes that same figure—117,288,396.08 cbXRP—and the one-to-one backing with XRP in custody. The largest holder, with 91,618,969 cbXRP, is the Morpho Blue singleton: the unique contract where the protocol stores the collateral for all its markets on Base. 78.1% of the token lives inside it.

The second protocol actor is two orders of magnitude lower: Moonwell, with 1.58 million cbXRP in its money market contract—approximately $2.3 million and 1.3% of the supply. Among the twelve largest holders, the rest are infrastructure contracts and individual addresses; Aave, Euler, and Compound do not appear. A token with such a majority locked as collateral has demand, but for a single function, and that function can be traced back to a specific market with public parameters.

Which Morpho market concentrates cbXRP collateral and under what terms?

The Morpho API returns two cbXRP/USDC markets on Base as of August 24, 2026:

n/a: the query did not capture the borrowed balance for the October market; it has not been estimated.

The LLTV (liquidation loan-to-value) is the debt-to-collateral percentage at which a position can be liquidated, and in Morpho Blue, it is fixed upon market creation and does not change: two markets for the same pair with different thresholds are different products. The October market accounts for 1.1% of the cbXRP held by Morpho; the January market accounts for 98.9%.

That this second market is the one Coinbase uses for its lending product is a documented inference, not a labeled data point: the Morpho API does not name who originates the positions, and Morpho Blue is a permissionless protocol where anyone can deploy a market with any parameters. It is supported by three separately verifiable pillars:

• The terms match to the decimal. Coinbase announced on February 18, 2026, that it accepted XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC as collateral for USDC loans with a maximum 49% LTV and liquidation at 62.5%, compared to 75% and 86% for Bitcoin and Ether. The only cbXRP/USDC market on Base with that threshold is the January one.
• The date fits a prior deployment. The market was created on January 15, 2026, one month before the public announcement: the typical timeframe between setting up infrastructure and opening it to the public.
• The magnitudes are consistent. The $41.0 million in live USDC borrowed against cbXRP on August 24 is in line with the cumulative originations—the total borrowed since the product opened, including what has been repaid—published in May for that asset.

The threshold is no longer exclusive to the USDC pair: on August 14, 2026, a cbXRP/jEUR market appeared with the same LLTV, currently without collateral. Being empty changes nothing, but duplicating the parameter in another debt pair is exactly what a product undergoing expansion would do.

No single pillar proves the attribution on its own; all three together leave little room for another explanation. The plumbing connecting the Coinbase interface to the Morpho contracts is reconstructed with figures in the DeFi Mullet analysis; here we are interested in the other side of the pipe.

How did cbXRP supply grow month-over-month in 2026?

The series is a proprietary calculation: daily market cap divided by daily price from CoinGecko history, taken on the 1st of each month. The assumption—that the market cap uses the contract supply—was verified against the daily reading: $171.2 million divided by $1.46 yields 117.3 million units, the exact supply of the contract.

The jump occurs in the period containing the announcement: +53% between February 1 and March 1, the largest increase in the series after eight nearly flat months. cbXRP was launched on June 5, 2025, alongside cbDOGE and took until February 2026 to reach 22.8 million units, with XRP moving from $2.17 on launch day to $1.65 after hitting a high of $3.65 in July 2025. From February to August, it multiplied by 5.1 in just over six months.

The easy explanation—price effect—points in the opposite direction: XRP went from $1.84 on January 1 to $1.46 on August 24, so the $171 million market cap undervalues the growth in the number of units. People were depositing XRP into custody at an average rate of about thirteen million units per month while the underlying asset was losing value.

Is the pattern repeated in cbDOGE, cbADA, and cbLTC?

cbADA and cbLTC were launched on June 26, 2025, completing the four-asset expansion announced on May 13. Morpho singleton shares of the supply for each as of August 24, 2026 (percentage is a proprietary calculation based on the two on-chain figures):

The cbBTC row highlights where the comparison fails: its share on Base is the highest, but it also has 53,695 units outside of Base—Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum—more than half of its total supply, and that is where its third-party usage lives. The four tokens of the second wave only exist on Base.

What does cbBTC have that the new Coinbase wrappers do not?

The cleanest contrast is in the list of cbBTC holders on Base: the second largest holder is Aave v3, with 2,393.9 cbBTC in its aBascbBTC contract, approximately $184.3 million at $76,971 per unit (proprietary calculation). Aave is an independent protocol with no commercial relationship with the issuer, whose governance voted to incorporate the asset because its users requested it as collateral. cbXRP does not appear in Aave, and its presence in third-party protocols—primarily Moonwell—remains at 1.3% of the supply.

The second contrast is in exchange liquidity:

n/a: the snapshot on August 24 did not capture this breakdown; it has not been estimated.

Sixteen times less depth for a market cap forty-four times smaller, and with an internal anomaly: the main cbXRP pool moves $5.70 million daily on $626,000 of reserves, a ratio of nearly 9 to 1 (proprietary calculation). That proportion describes a thin range that aggregators pass through when routing small trades. Volume measures how many trades cross the pool; the ability to absorb an order is measured by the reserve.

The starting point matters. cbBTC launched on September 12, 2024, one month after the WBTC custody change left half of DeFi looking for an alternative. For XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC in June 2025, there was no equivalent gap, and the demand that eventually filled the wrapper points toward Coinbase's own catalog.

Why is 94.3% of Coinbase loan collateral still Bitcoin?

Even accounting for the usage coming through the lending product, the second wave carries little weight in it. Breakdown of cumulative originations by asset published on May 12, 2026, with shares calculated over the total (proprietary calculation):

A precision that determines how these figures are read: the $31.6 million of XRP on May 12 are cumulative originations, everything lent since the product opened, including what was repaid. The $41.0 million in the Morpho market on August 24 is the live balance, what is lent at that moment. They are different metrics and are not subtracted or compared; the only legitimate joint reading is that both point to growth between May and August.

The bias fits the terms: a BTC holder draws up to 75% of the value and is not liquidated until 86%, while an XRP holder draws 49% and is liquidated at 62.5%. Whoever provides the more volatile collateral receives less money per unit of risk, and that limits how much credit the second wave can absorb. The distribution of the margin between who provides the capital, who sets the parameters, and who provides the interface is the same issue as the take rate of curators and protocols.

What options are there for XRP exposure from the Ethereum ecosystem?

Ordering by liquidity and on-chain activity—the relevant yardstick here, not market cap—the ladder looks like this as of August 24:

From this comes a check applicable to any wrapped asset: look at the reserves of its pools before its market cap. One hundred seventy-one million in market cap with two million in depth describes an asset that is minted and held, exited the same way it was entered: by redeeming it at Coinbase for native XRP. The fact that an independent issuer's wrapper (uXRP) remains at $2.7 million points in the same direction.

What cbXRP does work for is what it is being used for: leaving XRP as collateral and drawing USDC without selling, with a public threshold. The liquidation calculator shows at what XRP price that 62.5% triggers based on how much is requested; regarding the underlying, see XRP in 2026.

What would disprove that cbXRP growth is captive collateral?

The reading that sustains this article—that supply grows due to the issuer's lending product, not open adoption—can be overturned with public data. Three signals would falsify it, with thresholds set in advance:

A fourth signal does not falsify anything yet but is worth following: the cbXRP/jEUR market opened on August 14, 2026, with the same threshold. If it fills with counterparties outside the circuit, it weakens the reading.

All three can be consulted in minutes without private data. The most direct is the first: if the January market loses weight while supply rises, the token is finding exits outside the circuit that filled it.

The fourteen-month balance is measurable: four wrappers launched in June 2025, eight months of flat supply, a lending product that in February 2026 opened the door for them as collateral, and a 5.5x in cbXRP since then, with 78.1% of the result in a contract that is exited by repaying a loan. The path of a wrapper with its own demand is seen in cbBTC: deep pools and presence on the collateral lists of protocols its issuer does not control, with Aave as the second holder and $184 million inside. Distinguishing one case from the other costs two on-chain queries.

Sources and links: Coinbase — cbXRP proof of reserves · Blockscout Base — cbXRP contract holders · Basescan — cbXRP contract · Blockscout Base — aBascbBTC (Aave v3) · Morpho — public markets API · The Block — Coinbase adds XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC as collateral (Feb 18, 2026) · CoinCentral — terms: 49% LTV and 62.5% liquidation · The Block — origination breakdown by asset (May 12, 2026) · Coinbase — lending product page · The Block — launch of cbXRP and cbDOGE (Jun 5, 2025) · CoinDesk — launch of cbADA and cbLTC (Jun 26, 2025) · CoinDesk — launch of cbBTC (Sep 12, 2024) · GeckoTerminal — pools on Base · CoinLore — XRP price history · Universal Protocol — uAssets documentation