Sudden whale activity involving large sums may signify this for XRP
While it is nearly impossible to decipher the intentions of a crypto whale, some monthly cycles and world events can hint at the real picture. As September began, a relatively sedate weekend stream of whale alerts was broken by whales moving tens of millions of XRP between unknown wallets, Bittrex, Binance, and even Ripple. Does this signal a potential dump?
Notably, the transfers took place between 3 and 4 September. The whale alerts came at a time when a several altcoins were enjoying a rally. In the past seven days, altcoins including Solana [+60.16%], Litecoin [+27.44%], Polkadot [+26.75%], and XRP [+10.11%] were rallying.
One of the smallest transfers saw 10 million XRP sent from Ripple to an unknown wallet. Meanwhile, the largest transfer was 218,682,488 XRP (more than $280 million) sent from an unknown wallet to Ripple.
At press time, XRP’s price was $1.25130, after several days of correction. However, XRP whale watchers need to look at more than just the overall price rally.
Watching Escrows and Whales
XRP’s performance has been linked to diverse factors. Two of them include Ripple’s escrow and the spending activities of former Ripple CTO Jed McCaleb. On 1 August, 1 billion XRP were released to Ripple from escrow. Out of this, Ripple sent 182.3 million coins to McCaleb.
On 1 September, Ripple sent 174,862,720 XRP to Jed McCaleb’s “tacostand” crypto wallet, bringing the balance to 709,911,470.83271 XRP. While the impact of McCaleb’s XRP inflows/outflows on XRP’s price is still debatable, this whale’s trades could attract copycats. But for now, “tacostand” is yet to make any large outbound transfers this month.
Meanwhile, more traders were regaining interest in XRP as its price rallied alongside other alt coins. On 4 September, behavior analysis platform Santiment recorded 25942 active addresses on the XRP network in a 24 hour period.
In comparison, 4 August only saw 11768 active addresses within the same interval.
U.S. SEC v. Ripple
Outside the crypto sector, the XRP community has been keenly following the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission v. Ripple lawsuit. September could be key month for XRP, as even a minor court decisions could possibly trigger large-scale XRP dumps. For now, the unknown whales moved more than 380 million XRP in less than 12 hours.
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Sahana Venugopal, @KhareemSudlow