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Thomas Silkjaer, head of analytics and compliance at the XRP Ledger Foundation (XRPLF), points out a strange XRP-related occurrence on Poloniex, the oldest crypto exchange, which dates back to 2014.
Silkjaer says that Poloniex just gained more than 275,000 XRP by deleting over 15,000 old XRP accounts. He adds that this number is growing currently, and more than 30,000 XRP have been burned as fees in the process.
.@Poloniex just recovered ~275K XRP by deleting ~15K old XRP accounts. Number is growing as we speak, more than 30K XRP burned in fees in the process.
— Thomas Silkjær (@Silkjaer) June 15, 2023
In a response to his tweet, Silkjaer gives the more recent update that there are now 17,000 XRP accounts deleted. He notes that according to recent XRPL data, Poloniex seems to have more than 84,000 XRP accounts in total that might face a similar fate.
According to the top XRP Ledger explorer and network analysis platform, XRP Scan, this is the biggest spike in account deletions registered to date. The network analytics platform shared a screenshot of the chart showing a massive spike in account deletions, the largest within the timeframe between May 2020 and August 2023.
However, there may be less to worry about, as observation points out that these might be dormant accounts.
Neil Hartner, a senior staff software engineer at Ripple, observed that many of the deleted accounts appear to have been dormant since 2017. He says this might be interesting because Circle acquired Poloniex in early 2018 and then sold it in 2019.
Silkjaer agreed with this perspective, saying, "Yea, I believe they migrated to a destination tag-based model at some point."
According to XRP Ledger Services, which monitors XRPL's growth, there are presently 4,720,218 XRP accounts. The total XRP in these accounts amounts to 58,083,623,899 (58 billion) XRP. Meanwhile, only 1,043 accounts contain zero XRP.
Tomiwabold OlajideIn May, Silkjaer reported that XRPL had reached the five-million-account milestone.
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