One Billion XRP ($690M) on the Move: What Does it Mean?

A well-known tracker, which alerts when someone makes a massive transaction of many popular cryptocurrencies, indicated that 1 billion XRP has recently been moved.

What does it mean?

1 Billion XRP on the Move

Whale Alert has recently identified four transactions, adding up to 1 billion XRP, that were carried out over the past 24 hours. The transactions were split into the following amounts:

• 400,000,000 XRP
• 100,000,000 XRP
• 400,000,000 XRP
• 100,000,000 XRP

The four of them took place less than 24 hours ago.

1 billion XRP currently equates to roughly $690 million – a number worth looking into.

Business as Usual

Whale Alert notified that the transactions were sent out from Ripple Labs’ escrow wallet. These are regular monthly transactions.

To those unaware, Ripple Labs has placed 55 billion of its XRP in an escrow account that’s cryptographically secured. With the aim of providing some clarity and also alleviating potential market stress, the company has also put limitations on how much XRP it can sell per month.

This amount is capped at 1 billion XRP. Whatever the company doesn’t sell gets returned to the escrow account.

For example, according to Ripple’s markets report for the first quarter of 2023, the company sold some $361 million worth of XRP in the first three months of the year.

Ripple’s price is down 2.3% in the past 24 hours, but that’s unlikely related to the somewhat expected release of XRP tokens from Ripple Labs. On the contrary, the cryptocurrency is seemingly following the trajectory of the broader crypto market, which is also struggling in the past day.