1,000,000,000 XRP Unlocked by Ripple as Whales Shift 404,000,000 Tokens

Yuri Molchan

Fintech behemoth Ripple has shoveled its regular gigantic amount of XRP from escrow

San Francisco-based blockchain service provider Ripple has released another huge amount of XRP tokens, one billion, which is unleashed only on the first day of each month.

In the meantime, whales have shifted nearly half a billion XRP via the top crypto exchanges, pushing 180 million in a single chunk.

Ripple withdraws one billion XRP

As reported by Whale Alert on-chain data platform that tracks large crypto transactions, earlier today, Sept. 1, Ripple fintech firm withdrew a billion XRP from escrow.

This tremendous amount of crypto was extracted in three transactions, bearing 500,000,000; 200,000,000 and 300,000,000 XRP.

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Ripple has been unlocking these big lumps of XRP since 2018 with a goal to support the token’s liquidity. As a rule, only around from 100 to 200 million XRP tokens are added to the supply in circulation, and the rest gets locked back in escrow.

According to Ripple’s website, the company planned to make 55 releases from escrow, thus withdrawing 55 billion XRP. Therefore, it should have ended these operations earlier this year.

However, Ripple continues to release a billion tokens on the first day of each new month. One billion XRP is worth $237,000,000 at the current exchange rate.

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Image via Twitter

404 million XRP moved by whales

Whale Alert also reported several transactions performed by whales between large crypto exchanges as they shifted massive amounts of the seventh-ranked token, XRP.

Overall, these trading platforms shifted 404.6 million XRP. The largest single transfer here carried an astounding 180,000,000 XRP. The rest of the transactions moved 74.6 million, 50 million, 40 million and 60 million.

These tokens were moved with the participation of such exchanges as Binance, Bittrex, Bitso and Bitstamp.

XRP gets moved as Bitcoin and Ethereum slump significantly

Large movements of XRP have been reported by Whale Alert quite often over the past month as the coin’s price has dropped into the $0.03 range and has remained there.

As a result of a recent Bitcoin slump, the whole crypto market has been floating in the red zone. At the time of this writing, the leading cryptocurrency is trading below the $20,000 level, and Ethereum has dropped to $1,556. XRP is changing hands at $0.3251, losing more than 6% over the past week.

Bitcoin has gone down below the all-time high of $20,000 achieved in December 2017.