Hundreds of Millions of XRP Moved by Anon Wallets After Ripple Shifted Billion XRP

According to data shared by Whale Alert, over the past 15 hours, staggering amounts of Ripple-affiliated XRP tokens were moved by anonymous wallets between crypto exchanges.

A day before that, the Ripple behemoth transferred a whopping billion XRP.

218 million XRP on move

The aforementioned crypto tracking platform has spotted three massive chunks of XRP moved recently by wallets that it marked as “unknown.” These three transfers — 40, 30 and 147.8 million XRP — together make up 218 million XRP tokens worth around $73 million USD. The first two transactions out of these three were made to a Bitstamp wallet.

Data provided by the Bithomp XRP explorer shows that wallets linked to the major Bitstamp exchange received 40,000,000 XRP from an address related to the U.S.-based Bittrex exchange. The transaction that sent 30,000,000 XRP to Bitstamp came from the same platform.

As for the 148,700,000 XRP chunk, this crypto was sent from the Binance exchange to Bittrex, from one anonymous wallet to another.

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 148,700,000 #XRP (50,372,552 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallethttps://t.co/As14PhPM9r

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 1, 2023

Ripple withdraws 1 billion XRP

As reported by U.Today, on Jan. 1, Ripple fintech heavyweight made a scheduled withdrawal of a whopping 1 billion XRP from escrow. These monthly funds transfers have been made by the company since 2017-2018, when it decided to support the token’s utility in the market and to provide its partners and customers (banks and other financial institutions) with sufficient amounts of XRP.

Initially, Ripple locked 55% of the total 100 billion XRP supply in escrows and has been releasing 1 billion each month for about five years already.

As a rule, around 200-300 million XRP from that unlocked sum gets injected into the market, while the rest gets locked back in an escrow account. However, this time Whale Alert did not register any transactions that would send hundreds of millions of XRP back to escrow.