Ripple Unleashes 1 Billion XRP from Escrow as 2022 Kicks Off

Cryptocurrency tracker Whale Alert has reported that around ten hours ago, on January 1, 2022, Ripple tech behemoth put its hand in its deep pocket to release one billion XRP tokens.

Ripple unlocks one billion XRP

That is a regular procedure conducted on the first day of each month. For the past few years, these releases have been made in two transactions, each carrying 500 million coins.

These escrow releases are programmed and so have been made automatically since 2017. The plan was to gradually move 55 billion XRP from escrow, so these monthly transfers are likely to finish this year.

As a rule, Ripple then puts back 800 million or 900 million back in escrow, using the rest to cover its operational expenses, to send to its clients and other financial institutions, as well as support the coin’s liquidity by sending XRP to crypto exchanges.

Overall, the released billion XRP equals a whopping $835,140,718 in fiat. When these escrow releases only started four years ago, many in the XRP community feared that they would push the XRP price down and even started a petition on Change.org to demand that Ripple stopped unlocking coins. However, overtime it became clear that these released do not impact the price at all.

Ripple sends XRP to ODL corridor, Btistamp moves almost 200 million XRP

Around fourteen hours ago, Whale Alert also detected two XRP transfers, carrying twenty million coins each. The first one was made by Ripple to its ODL platform in the Philippines – Coins.ph exchange – via one of its extra wallets. That one is often used for sending XRP to external wallets.

With the second transfer US-based Bittrex exchange shifted twenty million XRP to Bitstamp trading platform. Bitstamp is Ripple’s ODL venue in Europe.

Aside from that, on December 31, a single lump of 177,149,680 XRP (worth $149,186,270) was sent by Bitstamp between its wallets as is clear from the data provided by the XRP analytics platform Bithomp.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 177,149,680 #XRP (149,186,279 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallethttps://t.co/X7pt3cRh8F

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 31, 2021

XRP price action

As of this writing, the 8-ranked cryptocurrency XRP is struggling to recover above the $1 level but it so far remains in the $0.084 range. On December 31, the coin briefly plunged to the $0.8074 level but the it managed to reclaim the $0.8489 zone.