Ripple moves 60m tokens from October unlock; Will it impact XRP?

Ripple moved 60 million XRP ($30 million) on October 9, from the 200 million kept from this month’s 1 billion XRP token unlock. These tokens were then distributed and passed through five different accounts before being deposited in small batches to four exchanges indicating they were sold.

Notably, during this possible sell-off from part of the freshly released XRP tokens, the price of the XRP/USD pair on Bitstamp — one of the exchanges that received 33.15 million out of the 60 million spent — suffered a massive dump from $0.50 to $0.458 (-8.5%), around the same time when everything happened.

Following the track of the 60 million XRP

After the 1 billion XRP escrow on October 1, Ripple re-locked 800 million in new escrows, keeping 200 million tokens in the “Ripple (1)” account, ready to be circulating through XRP’s supply inflation mechanism. Finbold retrieved this data from XRP Scan on October 10.

In this context, 60 million XRP were sent from “Ripple (1)” to the unknown address “rJqiM…La8nE” on October 9. 12 hours later, 55 million were forwarded to “rP4X2…sKxv3”. Interestingly, From the initial 60 million, 600,000 XRP were sent to “rM43T…bpuAi” and 180,000 XRP to “rKL6i…S5Xwa” — both smaller shares have not been moved by press time.

Interestingly, the 55 million tokens summed up with “rP4X2…sKxv3” previous balance, now forwarding 80 million XRP to “rhWt2…E32hk”, immediately sending 42.55 million to “rJgpQ…7hCvf”, and a total of 66.15 million also immediately forwarded to “r4wf7…h4Rzn”.

From this point, this last address distributed the whole amount to four centralized exchange known addresses plus the unknown address “rsdkG…apapb”, similar to what happened in September.

Does Ripple moving unlocked tokens impact the XRP price?

Despite not having a conclusive answer on how much Ripple moving freshly unlocked tokens can impact the XRP price, it is known that extra selling pressures can liquidate book orders if they involve a relevant amount of assets in comparison to its exchanged volume.

Bitstamp received 33.15 million (50%) of this first October’s sell-off, which was enough for an 8.5% price drop. Bitso received 21.40 million XRP, while Independent Reserves received 9.15 million and BTC Markets 1.40 million tokens.

XRP is being traded at $0.49 per token at the time of publication, but Ripple still has 140 million ($70 million) tokens that could be spent in the following days. This could create new localized selling pressures like the one observed yesterday.