Did Ripple just dump 75 million unlocked XRP?

Ripple transacted another 75 million unlocked XRP on October 16 from the 200 million tokens kept after October’s escrows. 

These are part of XRP’s monthly inflation that is usually sold or spent by Ripple during strategic market opportunities, such as the one experienced during a pump-and-dump event with Bitcoin (BTC).

On the same day, Ripple spent 75 million XRP, and crypto media outlets spread unverified and false rumors in the cryptocurrency market about the SEC’s approval of BlackRock’s Bitcoin spot ETF, which made BTC price go from $27,700 to $29,900 in just a few minutes, before retracing back to $28,000. This move also affected other cryptocurrencies, like XRP.

Notably, Ripple had already spent 60 million unlocked XRP on October 10. This new possible sell-off follows a very similar path and pattern to the former. These tokens were distributed and passed through six different accounts before being deposited in small batches to four exchanges indicating they were mostly sold out.

Following the tracks of the 75 million unlocked XRP

After the 1 billion unlocked XRP on October 1, Ripple re-locked 800 million in new escrows, keeping 200 million tokens in the “Ripple (1)” account. Ripple then spent 60 million tokens a few days later, leaving 140 million unlocked XRP behind.

Finbold retrieved these data from XRP Scan and tracked Ripple’s spending to gather insights on how XRP’s inflation can affect its holders’ purchasing power long and short term. The following information was collected on October 17 from the token’s public ledger.

In this context, 75 out of the 140 million remaining XRP were sent from “Ripple (1)” to the unknown address “rJqiM…La8nE” on October 16. Five hours later, 70 million were forwarded to “rP4X2…sKxv3”.

Interestingly, From the initial 75 million (held by “rJqiM…La8nE”), 1.05 million XRP was also sent to “rKL6i…S5Xwa”, immediately forwarded to a Bitstamp known account, probably to be sold in the spot market.

Back to the remaining trail, “rP4X2…sKxv3” only forwarded 26 million unlocked XRP to “rhWt2…E32hk”, from the received 70 million tokens. Which immediately sent 32.205 million to “rJgpQ…7hCvf”, and a total of 63.205 million was also immediately forwarded to “r4wf7…h4Rzn”. These accounts liquidated part of their previous balance.

From this point, this last address distributed the whole amount to four centralized exchange known wallet addresses plus the unknown address “rsdkG…apapb”, similar to what happened in September and almost identically to what happened last week.

All the accounts used last time were used again in this new possible sell-off. This, plus the short interval between each hop, could suggest that all the addresses selling off all monthly unlocked XRP belong to the same entity.

Additionally, the possible long-term effects of the token unlock and ongoing monthly inflation can be seen at the price XRP would trade if it ever reaches its all-time high market capitalization, which would be close to 30% less.