On the first day of July, Ripple, the San Francisco-based blockchain giant, has just unlocked 1 billion XRP token from its escrow wallet in two separate transactions, according to Whale Alert.
The tokens are cumulatively worth more than $177 mln, but their scheduled release is not expected to affect XRP’s price performance.
Ripple was blamed for XRP’s price performance
In December 2017, Ripple moved 55 bln tokens to its multiple cryptographically-secured escrow wallets in order to ensure supply predictability.
Ripple has long been accused of negatively affecting the XRP price with its quarterly sales, with CoinMetrics founder Nic Carter directly linking them to the token’s abysmal performance.
Almost 4,000 members of the XRP community have signed a petition on change.org to urge the blockchain decacorn to stop dumping XRP.
Last August, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claimed that these sales were meant to increase the token’s adoption.
XRP fails to rebound despite infinitesimal sales
However, despite that XRP’s sales declined to just $1.75 mln in Q1 2020, the price of the token remains down eight percent (in sharp contrast to the rest of the crypto market).
As of January 2018, Ripple owned 60 bln XRP tokens that were valued at a staggering $198 bln at their price peak of $3.30.
Now that the XRP price has fallen off a cliff, it would only be worth $10.2 bln as of today.
Valeria Blokhina
