Ripple Locks Away 800 Million XRP In Escrow, Impact On Price?

Ripple Labs, a leading American-based payment firm has locked away a substantial amount of XRP tokens in its escrow wallet as part of its monthly unlock program to help bolster its ecosystem and XRP.

A recent report from on-chain tracker Whale Alert revealed that Ripple took back about 800 million XRP tokens. This is no surprise, as the stated transaction has been a recurring outcome by the payment firm.

The payment firm locked the aforementioned funds after its monthly 1 billion XRP release, which has caught the attention of the crypto space. According to Whale Alert, the firm carried out the transaction in two distinct transfers. 

For the first transaction, Ripple locked away 500 million XRP tokens, valued at $253 million at the time of the report. Data from XRPScan shows that the 500 million XRP were initially transferred from “Ripple 23” to “Ripple 11” wallets before they were locked away.

Meanwhile, the second transaction saw 300 million XRP valued at about $151 million being transferred to the company’s escrow wallet. Whale Alert revealed the transaction was carried out by another wallet address identified as “Ripple 10,” according to data from the XRPScan. 

The firm has been releasing XRP from its escrow holdings every first day of the month. This process is a component of Ripple’s strategy to regulate the amount of XRP in circulation and uphold stability in the dynamic world of digital assets. 

After making up 55% of all XRP supply at first, the escrow accounts now own 40.7% of the supply. This is a result of the progressive unlocking process since it began in December 2017.

As of December 2017, the firm held 55 billion XRP as part of the escrow system initiative, which was mostly implemented on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

Whale Alert has also detected a substantial dump of XRP on cryptocurrency exchanges (CEXs). Whale Alert reported that over 67 million XRP was observed being moved to Bitso and Bitstamp platforms.

Further data shows that the unknown wallet address r4wf7enWPx…5XgwHh4Rzn transferred 37.9 million XRP to a Bitso-based wallet address. As of the time of transfer, the funds were valued at approximately $19 million.

Later on, 29.7 million XRP was moved to Bitstamp, a Luxemburg-based crypto exchange, in a separate transaction. According to the tracker, the same wallet address carried out the transaction worth about $15 million. This particular wallet address has been carrying out this type of transaction to the CEXs for a while now. It is believed that this might be due to Ripple’s strategic partnership with these centralized exchanges.

The price of XRP is still down by over 2% in the past week, trading at $0.505. Its market capitalization is currently up by 2%, but its trading volume has decreased by over 36% in the past 24 hours.