4.1 Billion XRP Moved from Bittrex Within Hour, Here’s What May Be Happening

As reported by Whale Alert cryptocurrency tracker, over the past hour, slightly less than a dozen transactions, carrying a total of 4.124 billion XRP coins, were spotted.

Per the aforementioned source, all these funds were moved from top U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex.

4 billion XRP leaves Bittrex exchange

Seven transactions out of those ten carried half a billion XRP each, and each of the other two transferred 300,000,000 and 324,254,650 XRP. That adds up to more than 4.1 billion XRP in all. This amount of XRP is evaluated at roughly $1.5 billion.

Whale Alert has tagged the sending wallet as one that belongs to major crypto exchange Bittrex. All of the transfers were sent to wallets marked as “unknown” by Whale Alert.

However, details provided by Bithomp, XRP-focused wallet tracking platform, shows that the receiving addresses were set up by Upbit, a major South Korean crypto exchange.

The astounding total amount of XRP transferred here, though, seems to be more than just withdrawing funds by an individual and was probably made by a financial institution — unless Bittrex was operating as an XRP custodian for Upbit, and now the exchange is withdrawing its Ripple-affiliated tokens, moving them to their own wallets.

1 billion XRP moved by Ripple Labs giant

As covered by U.Today earlier, on Dec. 1, Ripple fintech behemoth made a schedueled automated withdrawal of one billion XRP from escrow. It was one of the manifold escrows set up by the company in 2017 to begin regular monthly withdrawals in early 2018 in order to support the coin’s liquidity on exchanges and send a portion to Ripple’s partners and customers.

Initially, Ripple created 55 escrows to withdraw 55 billion. This makes the final release some time in the middle of this year, but Ripple still continues to remove a billion XRP from escrow wallets monthly.

Over the past couple of years, Ripple has been locking 300,000,000 or 200,000,000 XRP back in escrow after each withdrawal, thus injecting around 800-700 million XRP onto the market.