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Major crypto tracking bot Whale Alert, which tracks down large crypto transfers by whales and crypto exchanges, has registered a significant amount of XRP transferred to the Bitstamp exchange within the last 24 hours. The funds were deposited from an anonymous digital wallet.
This notable XRP transaction took place as the Ripple-affiliated XRP crypto, the holder of fifth place, according to the CoinMarketCap scale, staged a price surge of 4.45% over the weekend.
Millions of XRP sent to Bistamp amid XRP price surge
Whale Alert spotted a significant chunk of XRP transferred to the Bitstamp trading platform, carrying 24,200,000 XRP in total. This amount of crypto is equal to $14,918,529.
The transfer was made as the XRP price suddenly rose from the $0.61269 level on Saturday to $0.63999, where it is changing hands at the time of this writing. Thus, it may seem that a whale decided to sell a portion of their XRP portfolio in the wake of this abrupt price surge.
XRP and many other cryptocurrencies have staged price rises, following the leading digital currency Bitcoin surpassing the $41,000 level earlier today as it soared to $41,522 on Bitstamp.
Analysts believe that the BTC price surge above $40,000 has finally happened after a long wait due to the recent regulatory developments and high crypto market dynamics. However, in particular, a market analyst at IG Australia Pty Tony Sycamore believes that two reasons stood behind this rally: the imminent approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF by the SEC, probably even in early January, and traders' expectations of the Federal Reserve beginning interest rate cuts next year.
This Bitcoin price surge has opened the way for price increases of other cryptocurrencies, first of all of the top 10. Among them was Ripple-affiliated XRP with its 4% price uptick. The Ripple community expects a much higher price increase for XRP soon as they believe that the long-running court battle between the SEC regulatory agency and Ripple Labs is going to be settled soon enough.
Here's mysterious XRP seller
Data provided by the Bithomp explorer shows that the 24,200,000 XRP chunk was sent to Bitstamp from a wallet that is linked to Ripple Labs. The explanation here is a simple one: Bitstamp, along with other exchanges, has been a long-term partner of Ripple, helping it settle transactions made by the On-Demand Liquidity system (ODL), recently rebranded as simply "Ripple Payments."
Over the past three months, the blockchain decacorn has been sending 30 millionXRP chunks to Bitstamp every week (several times on a weekly basis), often adding to that similar-sized XRP transfers to the Bitso exchange located in Mexico.
Ripple previously emphasized the importance of fostering liquidity and creating use cases for XRP to ensure its long-term viability. For this purpose, it releases a billion XRP every month from escrow. But it then also moves about 800 million XRP back to be locked until new monthly releases. The 200 million XRP likely injected onto the crypto market once a month hardly has any significant effect on the XRP price.
Vladislav Sopov
Gamza Khanzadaev
Denys Serhiichuk
