Whale moves XRP worth $45.5M: Should you be worried?

• The transferred stash amounted to $14.5 million as of this writing.
• XRP lost 3.8% of its market value since the unfortunate exploit last week.

One of the world’s longest-standing crypto exchanges, Bitstamp, witnessed a substantial transfer of Ripple [XRP] tokens from a whale investor.

This triggered intense speculations among the traders of the payment-focused cryptocurrency.

XRP about to be dumped?

According to Whale Alert, as many as 29 million XRP coins were moved from an unknown wallet to the trading platform on the 4th of February at 9:56 pm UTC.

The transferred stash amounted to $14.5 million according to XRP’s market value at press time.

Typically, wealthy investors or whales moving a large chunk of their holdings to exchanges triggers anxiety among market participants.

This is because of the dominant belief that they are likely to be sold off, putting downward pressure on the asset.

However, this is not always true. Whales could also be changing wallets or exchanges, or making a large purchase. In the current scenario, it was difficult to gauge the real intentions behind the transfer.

Whales reduce activity but…

Whale transactions have significantly declined since the unfortunate hacking last week, which saw over 200 million XRP tokens getting stolen from accounts linked to parent company Ripple Labs.

Having said that, some whales try to sell their assets in smaller amounts over a more extended period to avoid drawing attention.

Source: Santiment

Anticipating XRP’s next moves

Meanwhile, XRP fell 1.5% in the last 24 hours. Hence, one could not completely rule out the sell-off narrative.

The sixth-largest cryptocurrency has failed to recover from the blows inflicted by last week’s exploit and has lost 3.8% of its market value since then.

The price decline was reflected in XRP’s futures market as well. The number of short positions taken for the coin exceeded the longs as of this writing, AMBCrypto noted using Coinglass’ data.

Source: Coinglass

Realistic or not, here’s XRP’s market cap in BTC’s terms

But despite the negativities, most traders were trying to get their hands on XRP.

According to AMBCrypto’s examination of Hyblock Capital data, a predominant greed sentiment prevailed in the market, spurring hopes of a price rebound.

Source: Hyblock Capital