XRP Whales On The Move Again, As Altcoin Records Significant Utility Spikes

In the last 48 hours, the XRP market has witnessed a significant amount of large-scale transactions, drawing much attention from the general crypto space. According to data from blockchain tracker Whale Alert, XRP whales conducted transactions involving over a billion XRP on Friday, September 1. 

Through a series of posts by Whale Alert on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), it can be inferred that the XRP market witnessed four major whale transactions. 

The biggest of these transactions was the transfer of 424,354,912 XRP – valued at $214,293,666 – from one unknown wallet to the other. In this context, unknown wallets refer to addresses with no affiliation to a crypto exchange. 

Furthermore, there was the move of XRP, 19,920,318 XRP worth $10,167,904, from another unknown wallet to the Binance exchange. It was also noted that a whale transferred 66,666,659 XRP, worth $33,065, 809 from an unknown wallet to the Binance exchange. 

However, the most notable transaction that caught most traders’ eye came from Ripple, the company behind the XRP cryptocurrency. 

75,000,000 #XRP (37,058,145 USD) transferred from #Ripple to unknown wallethttps://t.co/MIAbaaLoOS

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 1, 2023

Whale Alert reported that Ripple transferred 75,000,000 XRP, worth $37,058,145, from its Binance wallet to an unknown wallet. 

Following this move, some crypto enthusiasts believe that this particular unknown wallet also belongs to Ripple, as the company could be intending to soon offload those tokens on an exchange. This speculation has led to most investors predicting an incoming market dump. 

Ripple also conducted other transactions on September 1, locking about 800,000,000 XRP in escrow. 

However, this does not raise any concern as the crypto payment firm is known to release 1,000,000,000 XRP at the start of every month before proceeding to lock up about 80% of the new tokens a few hours later. 

Following the massive transactions in the XRP market, on-chain analytics firm Santiment has provided a report highlighting some of the effects of these whale movements.

According to an X post on September 1, Santiment reports an on-chain transaction volume of 4.8 billion XRP, marking the seven highest value of this metric in the XRP market over the last seven months. 

The analytics firm also noted that there are currently about 2.03 billion XRP in circulation, representing the token’s highest-circulating supply since May 31. In addition, XRP development activity was also reported to be on the high side.

At the time of writing, XRP still finds itself struggling amid a general market downturn. The fifth-largest cryptocurrency trades at $0.4983 with a 1.88% loss in the last day, according to data from CoinMarketCap.