Anonymous wallets move staggering amounts of XRP

According to information provided by Whale Alert, unknown wallets moved significant quantities of XRP tokens between cryptocurrency exchanges over the past day. Ripple sent a staggering billion XRP the day before.

Transaction details

The cryptocurrency above tracking tool has discovered three sizable transfers of XRP from wallets that it has flagged as “unknown” recently. The combined value of these three transfers is 40, 30, and 147.8 million XRP, totalling around 218 million XRP tokens, or about $73 million.

Out of these three, the first two transactions were made to a Bitstamp wallet.

Wallets connected to the significant Bitstamp exchange got 40,000,000 XRP from an address associated with the American-based Bittrex exchange, according to data published by the Bithomp XRP explorer. This is reportedly the same platform as the transaction that delivered 30,000,000 XRP to Bitstamp.

The 148,700,000 XRP chunk was sent from a single anonymous wallet to Bittrex via the Binance exchange.

Is this connected to the recent 1bn XRP withdrawal?

As planned, the financial powerhouse Ripple, currently engaged in a heated lawsuit with the SEC, took 1 billion XRP out of escrow on January 1. 

Since the firm chose to promote the usability of the token in the market and to supply its partners and clients (banks and other financial institutions) with enough XRP in 2017–2018, it has been making these monthly payment transfers. Initially, Ripple held 55% of the 100 billion XRP supply in escrow, releasing 1 billion per month for the past five years.

Typically, of the unlocked amount, 200–300 million XRP are released into the market, while the remaining portion is kept locked away in an escrow account. Whale Alert did not record transactions that would have returned hundreds of millions of XRP to escrow.