Ripple Moving Hundreds of Millions Worth of XRP Around: Why Now?

Ripple has been making moves, transferring millions of XRP to centralized exchanges and to other wallets. The company initiated three “whale” transfers flagged by a popular service that tracks large transactions.

First things first, it’s important to outline that there’s been a development in the case between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

As CryptoPotato reported earlier today, the SEC scored a small victory after a judge ordered Ripple Labs to provide historical financial statements in response to a longstanding request from the Commission. The company had previously contested the request, essentially claiming that its financial status wasn’t pertinent to the case.

With that in mind, Ripple has initiated three transfers in the last 24 hours for a combined 206 million XRP, worth around $103 million.

The first transaction was initiated about 16 hours ago – it was for almost 54M XRP, sent to an address activated by Ripple. The second transaction was for 120M XRP, and again, it was sent to an address activated by the company. The last one was sent from Ripple to Bitstamp with the intention of selling the tokens, perhaps. It was for slightly less than 29M tokens, worth around $14.5 million at the time of this writing.

It’s worth noting that the movements are unlikely to be related to the recent developments in the case against the SEC. Ripple has been selling millions of XRP to the open market for years now. In fact, that’s part of what the case is about – the Commission alleges that XRP is an offer of investment contract and that Ripple has conducted an unregistered security offering.

This claim has been partially debunked in the summer of 2023, when Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sold on secondary markets doesn’t constitute an offer of investment contracts.

Meanwhile, XRP’s price has been largely unaffected by the above developments, as it trades almost flat on the day, down some 0.8%, which is more or less in line with the rest of the market.