Ripple whale moves 20 million XRP

The Ripple ledger recorded a biggish payment worth 20 million XRP a couple of days ago, April 17th. The operation was worth 6.71 USD million at current XRP prices (the token is trading at $0.335736 as we write this). But the price was quite lower at the time the transfer went through. During that day, XRP traded between 0.3157 and 0.32533, so it would have been a little cheaper at the time, depending on the exact time of transacting (which hasn’t been disclosed), but not by much, not more than 6%.

The operation was reported by a Ripple blockchain watcher known as XRPL Monitor on Tweeter:

This kind of transfer is usually called a “whale movement,” and some observers pay attention to this kind of operations. The reason is that making such payment or transfer requires for the originating party to buy XRP tokens before it could send them, it’s the kind of thing that increases trading volume and drives the currency price up.

As whales go, this one is not that impressive. Sure, it’s most probably a lot more than what you and I have stored in our crypto wallets, but in the past, we’ve seen transfers as high as 73.2 million XRP in volume. When that whale sang, the transfer was worth about USD 15 Million, so the whale in question is not even half as big. That’s why other observers such as “Whale Alert” didn’t take the trouble to report it.

So we don’t know the time of the transfer, who sent it or who received it. Well, we know the address of the receiving wallet, of course, as that’s standard information stored in the Ripple ledger, but we have no idea who it belongs to. We do know that, before the transfer, it held 0.99982 XRP.

So what else do we know? Nothing more, strictly speaking, but we can make a few educated guesses.

We can start by assuming that the sender didn’t buy any XRP to send, so he had them ready in advance. Why? April 16th has been the slowest day of the week for XRP trading. The price was the week’s lowest, and the trading volumes were almost non-existent. A buying order for 20.000.000 XRP would have affected the market in apparent ways. At least it would have prompted a spike in trading volume indicators which we didn’t see at all.

Before you object, yes, XRP’s daily trading volume is slightly above a billion dollars. So a lousy six million would not have changed the game at all in 24 hours right? Well, wrong. If it had happened because of a single order, it would have produced a jump in the charts, especially since, as we wrote already, it was a prolonged day for XRP traders.

Our suspicion is also confirmed by the sender’s balance which is of 1,898,209,057.9865 XRP. That’s about USD 626 million. So this was either a wealthy guy paying a bet (or something of the sort) or one of Ripple’s institutional partners was settling a pending account. There are no more clues for the time being, except that the receiving wallet was basically empty, but that tells us nothing.

So we haven’t seen Moby Dick in the XRP market yet. But, if you know the story, every whale is valuable in its own way.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

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Naveed Iqbal: A crypto nerd, internet security wizard. Believer of 'decentralization' in real. Love helping others and spreading information worth sharing.