A total of 4,000,000 XRP — a stash over $10.5 million — has been locked into escrow, as revealed by Whale Alert, and while the number is not huge compared to Ripple's billions worth of monthly releases, it is still an extraordinary event in a series of transfers around wallets and exchanges.
The wallet that received the lock, however, is not so random; it is Flare Core Vault, the same address already holding more than 1,570,000,000 XRP. Thus, the revelation makes the theory that some random investor shuffled coins off an exchange irrelevant, but the impact on the market remains.
For those not familiar, this is ecosystem infrastructure, the kind that Flare uses for collateral and governance, and it plugs straight into the larger story, where over 35,000,000,000 XRP, about 33% of the total supply of the cryptocurrency, is tied up in escrow across the XRP Ledger.
XRP escrows can be sold
What makes the move more relevant is the timing. Just earlier this week,
That means "locked" XRP is not just frozen coins waiting for a calendar date; it is also a set of claims that can move around between entities and serve as instruments in their own right.
So, the headline is 4,000,000 coins put aside, but the takeaway is bigger: the XRP supply is being shaped not just by trading volumes and exchange flows but by how escrows are used, controlled and reassigned, and in this case the answer leads directly to Flare.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team