San Francisco-based fintech behemoth Ripple Labs has conducted a programmed released of one billion XRP from escrow addresses, according to recent tweets published by popular crypto tracker Whale Alert.
Ripple moves one billion XRP
The above-mentioned crypto tracking platform spotted three staggering transfers, carrying 500,000,000 XRP, 300,000,000 XRP and 200,000,000 XRP β a billion Ripple-affiliated tokens in total worth $601.4 million in fiat.
These withdrawals have been taking place since early 2018 as Ripple set itself the task of supporting the liquidity of XRP on exchanges and on the cryptocurrency market in general. They take place on the first day of a new month.
As a rule, on the day that follows the withdrawals, about 800 million XRP are moved back to escrow by Ripple Labs until the next release that happens every 30 days. These regular XRP releases do not seem to impact the XRP price.
The circulating supply of XRP currently constitutes 53,888,571,585 XRP, according to CoinMarketCap. At the time of this writing, the Ripple-affiliated token is changing hands at $0.61381 on the Bitstamp exchange, showing a 2.79% rise since Tuesday and rising 2.26% within the last 24 hours.
Anon whale withdraws 27 million XRP from Binance
The aforementioned source also detected a withdrawal of 27,000,000 XRP from the Binance exchange. This is the equivalent of $16,413,770 USD.
At the first glance, this may seem like an untimely purchase that breaks the trading rule "buy low, sell high," as the XRP price demonstrated a rise since Thursday. However, additional details shared by the Bithomp explorer focused on XRP show that the sender wallet also belongs to Binance, making this an internal transfer.
Last week, Ripple transferred 90 million XRP to an unidentified blockchain address. The community started speculating about the crypto giant making a giant sale, but it turned out that the transaction was targeted at a minor Ripple wallet with a likely goal to move it outside the company later on.
Community expects Ripple-SEC settlement
A recent turn of events, it seems, led the XRP community to believe that the Ripple-SEC case, which has sometimes been running and sometimes crawling over the past three years (since December 2020) may be settled soon.
A week ago, the SEC regulator announced an upcoming closed meeting, allegedly to discuss the continuation of the Ripple case. However, earlier this year, Ripple scored two major wins against the regulator in court.
In July, Federal Judge Torres ruled that Ripple's XRP transfers to the secondary market cannot be considered security sales. The second one happened in the fall and here, in a surprising turn of events, the SEC dropped personal charges against Ripple boss Brad Garlinghouse and the company's co-creator, Chris Larsen.
Judge Torres's summer ruling pushed the XRP price to a local high of $0.71. A decline followed pretty quickly.
Denys Serhiichuk
Tomiwabold Olajide
Godfrey Benjamin
