XRP Sharks & Whales Push Bags To ATH As Price Rockets 19%

On-chain data shows the XRP sharks and whales have expanded their holdings to a new all-time high (ATH) with a 10% jump in August.

According to data from the analytics firm Santiment, the XRP sharks and whales have sharply increased their holdings recently. The indicator of relevance here is the “Supply Distribution,” which tells us about the total amount of the cryptocurrency that a given wallet group is holding right now.

Addresses or investors are divided into these cohorts based on the number of coins that they are currently carrying in their balance. A wallet holding 5 XRP, for instance, falls into the 1 to 10 coins group.

In the context of the current topic, the 10 million to 100 million tokens cohort is of interest. At the current exchange rate, this range converts to $6.13 million at the lower end and $61.30 million at the upper one.

Clearly, the entities that would qualify for this group would be among the largest in the sector. More specifically, the higher end of the sharks and the lower end of the whales would fall inside this range.

Generally, the influence of any entity on the network goes up the more coins that they hold, so the behavior of these large holders can be worth keeping an eye on, as it may end up affecting the market.

Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the XRP Supply Distribution for these sharks and whales over the past few months:

As is visible in the above graph, the XRP sharks and whales have sharply increased their holdings during the past few days. Alongside the buying, the asset has seen a rebound from its crash, with a particularly large jump coming during the past 24 hours.

This latest increase in the cryptocurrency’s price is a result of Ripple’s victory against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as the court has ruled that the firm only has to pay $125 million of the $2 billion fine that the SEC had sought.

Interestingly, the bulk of the shark and whale accumulation had actually come ahead of the news, implying that big money investors may have had anticipated the outcome.

The Supply Distribution for the 10 million to 100 million coins group is now at a new ATH, as investors belonging to the cohort combined carry around 7.06 billion XRP, worth around $4.3 billion right now. This reflects an increase of more than 10% in August alone.

In the same chart, Santiment has also attached the data for another indicator, the Social Dominance, which basically tells us about what percentage of social media discussions related to the top 100 cryptocurrencies that a given asset is currently occupying.

This indicator appears to have seen a sharp spike for XRP, which makes sense as users have been talking about the Ripple case closure and the price rally. Excessive hype, however, has historically not been a positive sign for the coin’s price.

XRP has almost made full recovery from the drawdown that had begun at the end of July as its price has returned to $0.61.