Here’s Why Ripple Sells Millions of XRP as Price Shows Negative Twist

According to recent data shared by Whale Alert blockchain tracker, over the period of the last 24 hours, two anonymous transactions, moving nearly 53,000,000 XRP, have been spotted.

Their destinations were popular crypto exchanges Bitstamp and Bitso.

Ripple again stands behind anonymous wallets, shifting XRP

The aforementioned transactions carried 30,100,000 XRP and 22,850,000 XRP valued at $14,731,086 and $11,171,049, respectively. The first one went to the Europe-based Bitstamp, the second one to the largest crypto exchange in Mexico (crypto unicorn and Ripple ODL partner) Bitso.

Details provided by the XRP-focused analytics service Bithomp show that the sender’s wallet r4wf7enWPxyHtbizyV7ZHiZi5XgwHh4Rzn is linked to the San Francisco-based blockchain heavyweight Ripple Labs, and it was basically Ripple that transferred 53 million XRP to Bitstamp and Bitso.

Besides, transfers from Ripple-linked wallets to Bitstamp have been taking place several times per week over the past few months. Transactions to Bitso happen more seldom but have also become regular recently.

XRP price in decline

In the meantime, the XRP price has demonstrated a negative turn over the last 24 hours, dropping by 2.74% to the $0.47839 level. A little uptick that followed helped it add less than 1% to its price. At the time of this writing, XRP is changing hands at $0.48313.

Earlier this week, an enormous transfer of approximately 408,000,000 XRP was spotted by Whale Alert as this huge lump of crypto from the Bitvavo exchange to an anonymous blockchain address. That was worth around $200,000,000 and showed a surge in interest of cryptocurrency whales in Ripple-affiliated XRP token.

What makes Ripple send XRP to these exchanges

One of the two motives drove Ripple to move these millions of XRP to crypto exchanges. One was to sell those 53 million XRP. However, the price is currently in decline, so a sale would not be profitable here.

The other one is that both Bitso and Bitstamp collaborate with Ripple on the service formerly known as On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). It utilized XRP for making fast and low-cost cross-border transactions along these ODL corridors without using any prefunded bank accounts. Recently, ODL was rebranded as simply “Ripple Payments” to make this service easier to understand for outsiders, according to a comment from a high-ranking Ripple official.

There are multiple corridors like that across the world set up by Ripple, which cover Asia, Europe, Latin America and the USA.

About the author

Yuri Molchan