Number of XRP whales rising, while reasons for PayPal’s disregard are revealed

• Data by Santiment shows that XRP holders with more than 1 million tokens increased to an all-time high of 17,625.
• PayPal and its custody partner Paxos were guided by SEC regulations for not listing XRP.

XRP has had a positive performance in the upward trend led by Bitcoin and Ethereum over the last two weeks. At the time of publication, XRP is trading near its annual high with $0.27 and has gained 2.74% in the last 24 hours. In the weekly and monthly chart, XRP is recording gains of 9.07% and 10.53% respectively.

This is positive trend is also reflecting in the number of XRP whales. According to Santiment’s data, last week’s rally of XRP has been accompanied by an increase in number of whales; with an all-time high of 17,625 XRP holders that have between 1 and 10 million of the digital asset. Moreover, there are now 307 whales that hold more than 10 million XRP, down four holders since the September peak. The addresses which hold between 100 and 1,000 XRP are also at an all-time high of 332,560.

Source: https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1327852358110330881/photo/1

That’ why Paypal does not offer XRP

By making Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash part of its services, PayPal has caused quite a hype on the crypto market since end of October.  The payment giant partnered with Paxos Trust for the custody of the crypto assets. However, questions have been raised in the crypto community about why XRP was left off the list. In an interview, Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla now revealed the reasons behind PayPal’s decision by attributing it to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, by which Paxos orients itself:

That’s what [PayPal was] looking for and that’s what we had. We actually have authority to be able to custody and trade additional tokens. We have Pax Gold, which is one of our tokens. We have Pax dollars. So there are other products that we have that weren’t included in the crypto brokers launch. But in terms of pure cryptocurrencies, those are the four that we have that we’re listing on our exchange and really providing custody for.

Cascarilla has also revealed that PayPal plans to expand its services to allow its users to send cryptocurrencies and even shop at its 26 million affiliated merchants. According to the CEO of Paxos, PayPal plans to expand the number of cryptocurrencies it offers its customers. However, he stressed that the main problem with listing an asset depends on whether it is considered security by the US SEC:

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash as a result, Litecoin, which are very similar, and Ethereum have essentially been grandfathered in by the SEC, Bitcoin explicitly and Ethereum explicitly. And once you start getting away from these top four, there are always a little bit of questions around them. Not just for us, but for the industry in general. So that’s something we need to be sensitive about.

As CNF reported, the security question is also a sensitive issue for Ripple for quite a while. The payment solutions company is currently facing multiple lawsuits that seeks to classify XRP as a security.