- Ripple transferred 120 million XRP tokens, worth $101 million, sparking fears in the community that it would be dumping them into a troubled market.
- On the legal front, the SEC got the upper hand recently after a court ruled in its favor, ordering Ripple to turn over financial statements regarding its sales of XRP.
It has been a jittery start to the month for the XRP community. On Monday, Ripple made three transfers from its wallets, shifting over 200 million XRP tokens, spooking the community and sparking fears of a dump. With a recent ruling handing the advantage to the SEC, the XRP community is watching closely for new moves.
At 17:41 UTC on Monday, an official Ripple wallet address transferred 53,750,023 XRP to an unknown address, as revealed by Whale Alert. The transfer, worth $27.6 million, got the community talking, with some questioning whether it had any connection to the court ruling in which RIpple was ordered to turn over XRP-related financial statements to the SEC.
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 5, 2024
Three hours later, at 20:52 UTC, another Ripple address made an even bigger transfer, moving 120 million XRP (worth $60.1 million) to another unknown address.
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 5, 2024
While one transfer was enough to spark speculation, the second one, which was more than twice as large, got the XRP community talking.
“The movement of such a significant amount of XRP certainly piques my curiosity. The anonymity of the recipient sparks thoughts on the true intentions behind such transfers,” one investor stated on X.
In between the two significant transactions was a third one, and while it wasn’t as big as the other two, it was the most significant. At 20:48 UTC, an unofficial wallet address transferred 28.85 million XRP to Bitstamp, the Luxembourg-based exchange. While Whale Alert doesn’t identify the sender, Bithomp identified the address as belonging to Ripple.
Some suspected that Ripple had transferred the XRP to cash out. However, it could also have been to facilitate the continued international payments that the California company powers. Bitstamp is one of the entities that Ripple enrolled to process payments via Ripple Payments, which was previously known as On-Demand Liquidity. The product uses XRP to power cross-border payments, reducing the transfers from days to seconds at fractions of a penny in transaction charges.
What’s Next for XRP?
XRP is trading at $0.5037 at press time and has barely changed in the last day despite a 12% rise in trading volume.
According to Santiment, the crypto market’s sentiment toward XRP and other top tokens like BTC, Ether, Solana and BNB has recently turned sour. This is expected—since October, traders have been treated to massive growth by most cryptos, but since the turn of the year, most cryptos have largely stagnated. XRP opened the year at $0.6234 but has since shed close to 20% of that value.
