80 Million XRP on the Move: What’s Behind the Whale Activity?

• XRP whale movements intensify, adding to price uncertainty amidst ongoing legal battles.
• Significant surge in XRP futures trading and derivatives market volume highlights growing investor interest.

Ripple Labs cryptocurrency, XRP, has surprised crypto investors with its large whale swings following eye-catching escrow transactions and price volatility. According to on-chain data, there were about 80 million coins shuffled while billions of XRP escrow locks and unlocks were done over the weekend.

Speculation Over XRP’s Future

Because of the ongoing legal dispute between Ripple and the U.S. SEC, participants in the cryptocurrency market are speculating a lot about the future price trajectory of XRP. This brief analysis provides further insight into the unpredictable future of XRP by outlining the whale activity and significant escrow transactions that occurred over the weekend.

Following the unlocking of 1 billion XRP from the escrow and the locking of 800 million coins in the same, the on-chain transaction tracker Whale Alert found that XRP whales moved 80 million coins.

One whale accumulated while the other offloaded XRP to exchanges among the 80 million coins shuffled. Future price swings of the Ripple-backed asset now include an element of mystery.

Weekend Escrow Transactions 

At the same time, weekend data indicates that 1.2 billion coins were first transferred to Ripple. A further 800 million XRP was held in escrow at Ripple, while 1 billion tokens were released from escrow at unidentified wallets. These trades taken together have added to the uncertainty around the potential price swings of XRP.

However, Coinglass data shows that XRP futures open interest increased significantly, rising 2.30% to $630.56 million, while derivatives market volume increased noticeably, 118.50% to $597.14 million. This increase highlights the higher trading activity in the futures market, together with the growing interest in the asset from investors.

Current Price and Market Sentiment 

At the time of writing, XRP was valued at about $0.5207, up 0.80% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data. But it shows that, during the last seven days, it has been bearish, down 1.30%. Further demonstrating the substantial whale activity in the market, CNF recently reported on a whale buying $52 million worth of XRP from Binance.