Ripple transacted another 75 million unlocked XRP on October 16 from the 200 million tokens kept after October’s escrows.
These are part of XRP’s monthly inflation that is usually sold or spent by Ripple during strategic market opportunities, such as the one experienced during a pump-and-dump event with Bitcoin (BTC).
On the same day, Ripple spent 75 million XRP, and crypto media outlets spread unverified and false rumors in the cryptocurrency market about the SEC’s approval of BlackRock’s Bitcoin spot ETF, which made BTC price go from $27,700 to $29,900 in just a few minutes, before retracing back to $28,000. This move also affected other cryptocurrencies, like XRP.
Ripple 75 million XRP trail. Source: XRP Scan and Finbold
Back to the remaining trail, “rP4X2…sKxv3” only forwarded 26 million unlocked XRP to “rhWt2…E32hk”, from the received 70 million tokens. Which immediately sent 32.205 million to “rJgpQ…7hCvf”, and a total of 63.205 million was also immediately forwarded to “r4wf7…h4Rzn”. These accounts liquidated part of their previous balance.
From this point, this last address distributed the whole amount to four centralized exchange known wallet addresses plus the unknown address “rsdkG…apapb”, similar to what happened in September and almost identically to what happened last week.
All the accounts used last time were used again in this new possible sell-off. This, plus the short interval between each hop, could suggest that all the addresses selling off all monthly unlocked XRP belong to the same entity.
Additionally, the possible long-term effects of the token unlock and ongoing monthly inflation can be seen at the price XRP would trade if it ever reaches its all-time high market capitalization, which would be close to 30% less.
