Ripple’s monthly movement of XRP is underway, with the San Francisco-based company recently unlocking 1 billion XRP, worth about $177.6 million, from escrow.
Ripple owns more than half of the total supply of XRP. In December of 2017, the startup pledged not to sell all of its tokens at once, locking up 55 billion XRP into a series of cryptographically secured escrow accounts.
The company then set up a schedule to release one billion XRP each month, sell a portion to fund its operations and invest in startups, and return the rest back into escrow.
Whale Alert tracked the recent movements in real time, which happened in two separate 500 million XRP transactions.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 500,000,000 #XRP (88,240,341 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 1, 2020
Ripple also recently transferred 30 million XRP, worth about $5.3 million, to an unknown wallet.
30,000,000 #XRP (5,329,905 USD) transferred from Ripple to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) June 30, 2020
The mysterious wallet has received numerous payments from Ripple before, including 20 million XRP, worth approximately $3.56 million, on June 25th; 30 million XRP on June 16th; 40 million XRP on June 8, worth approximately $7.1 million; and 30 million XRP on June 2nd, according to Bithomp. The wallet currently has a balance of 20 million XRP.
In Q1 2020, Ripple sold $1.75 million worth of XRP directly to institutions, down 86% from $13.08 million in the previous quarter. Ripple sold zero XRP on crypto exchanges, which it typically does programmatically.
Ripple has dramatically slowed its cryptocurrency sales since Q3 of 2019, when it sold $251.51 million in XRP.
In December, Ripple raised $200 million in a series C funding round led by Tetragon that valued the company at $10 billion.