Recently, the number of XRP addresses containing at least 1 million tokens has been declining. This has been generated thanks to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission against Ripple. Therefore, XRP whales are slowly declining.
It appears that XRP whales are liquidating a portion of their holdings amid the regulatory uncertainty surrounding Ripple. Coin Metrics estimated that the number of wallet addresses that have at least 1 million XRP has dropped to 1,567 from 1,721 between December 21, 2020 and January 3.
The number of XRP whales had risen steadily since the beginning of 2019 before falling sharply in late December. This is the lowest level it has had since late 2019.
What’s behind the whale decline of XRP?
Mainly, XRP whales have been affected by accusations from the SEC that Ripple violated regulations by selling unregistered securities. These values are equivalent to US $ 1.3 billion. The demand started by the US regulator generated a drop of more than 70% in the price of XRP.
In all this time, exchanges and fund managers began to distance themselves from the project. For example, Grayscale Investments announced that its Digital Large Cap Fund had been fully liquidated of its XRP holdings. Similarly, Bitwise Asset Management removed XRP from its stock before Christmas.
Amid all the BTC and cryptocurrency frenzy, XRP seems to be the only one dropping considerably. All coins that were in the top 15 saw gains on Tuesday. But obviously this was not the case for XRP.
Such is the level that XRP is close to being surpassed by Litecoin in market capitalization rankings. A considerable precedent is that LTC briefly dethroned XRP in fourth place on the list over the weekend.
Final comments
If this trend continues, and the XRP whales continue to decline, we will see that it could fall even two positions lower than Litecoin. Controversy continues, with XRP still not experiencing the advantages that other cryptocurrencies are currently experiencing.
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