but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.
Cryptocoins have no such fundamental value backstop - someone desperately trying to sell a large fraction of the market cap would drive the price to basically zero in short order.
They can't. They've escrowed that 60 billion away and will release it to institutions at regular intervals. Any XRP that isn't bought will be put back in escrow. The executives that have large amounts of XRP themselves are contractually obligated to not dump it. They can only sell a certain amount per week. I think its like 10,000 or something (but I could be wrong on that).