XRP sees renewed demand for its network; the reason is quite surprising

XRP registered weekly gains of nearly 20% until press time.
The number of transactions involving the transfer of more than $1 million worth of XRP swelled over the previous week.

Despite being embroiled in one of the biggest and most controversial lawsuits in the brief history of cryptocurrencies, Ripple [XRP] managed to log in significant gains over the last few weeks of trading activity.

According to CoinMarketCap, XRP grew phenomenally, to the tune of nearly 20% over the past week. Moreover, its growth on a month-to-date (MTD) basis was 21%.

At the time of writing, it was the sixth largest crypto in the market, having added $3.8 billion to its market cap since the start of March.

All these factors underlined that March was a profitable month for the coin. But what’s powering this momentum?

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

Whales gobble XRP

According to Whale Alerts, a website that tracks whale transactions, a large amount of XRP tokens were moved across wallets recently. One large address scooped up 50 million XRP tokens, worth $22 million, after a transfer from Mexico-based crypto exchange, Bitso.

🚨 🚨 50,800,000 #XRP (22,840,638 USD) transferred from #Bitso to unknown wallethttps://t.co/qtoDMKhtk8
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 26, 2023

Data from Santiment narrated a similar story. The number of transactions involving the transfer of more than $1 million worth of XRP swelled over the previous week.

At the same time, the number of addresses holding more than 10 million tokens soared. Hence, it can be safely concluded that whales were amassing and not dumping XRP.

Source: Santiment

One of the reasons behind this massive interest could be due to the growing optimism in pro-XRP circles regarding a favorable outcome in the Ripple vs. SEC lawsuit.

The recently-appointed President of Ripple Labs Monica Long expressed confidence about having a positive resolution later this year.

Even former critics like Ryan Selkis, founder of blockchain analytics firm Messari, came out in support of Ripple and pushed for wider adoption of its XRP Ledger (XRPL).

I’ve been critical of Ripple in the past (various reasons), but more aligned with them than ever before.
Ripple should win the overreaching XRP-SEC case, and the XRP Ledger should be afforded the opportunity to compete fairly on digital payments infra globally.
Demand is there! https://t.co/fewaEami0p
— Ryan Selkis 🪳 (@twobitidiot) March 21, 2023

XRPL sees demand

The XRPL is a layer-1 blockchain developed by Ripple which serves as a global payments network, serving major banks and financial services.

As per data from XRP Scan, the daily transactions executed on the network reached a 16-month high of 2.36 million on 19 March, an indication of its growing adoption and user base.