The price of popular cryptocurrency XRP saw exceptional performance during today’s trading session, as the quotes of the $160 billion asset suddenly soared by 7.5%. Following this sudden act of price appreciation, XRP saw its quotes reach a two-week high of $2.75.
Interestingly, the price action was preceded by a shift of over $1 billion worth of XRP by San Francisco-based cross-border crypto payments provider, Ripple. The company is the largest user of XRP, with the token being used in Ripple’s services, including remittances, money settlements, cross-border payments and on-demand liquidity.
Both the token and the company are associated with each other, even though they are two different entities. Ripple even holds 37.44 billion XRP in its escrow accounts, which it gradually releases each month.
However, the transfer, which occurred in two tranches, is not related to the monthly release of tokens and happened suddenly. Ripple first moved 300 million XRP, which is currently worth $822 million. The transfer happened to a previously unknown address, “rP4X2.” It is not a fresh or new wallet and has been in use since 2023. Whether it is a Ripple wallet remains unanswered.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 300,000,000 #XRP (778,731,954 USD) transferred from #Ripple to unknown wallethttps://t.co/oOSdKeq1kT
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 13, 2025
The next was a 90 million XRP shift, when an amount of tokens worth about $246.6 million was sent to “rhWt2.” This wallet is also not new and has been exploited for the last two years. However, it is difficult to say that it belongs to Ripple as well, since it was not even activated by the company.
Sudden large transfers of cryptocurrency often cause anxiety and trigger greed and fear in market participants. In this case, the ripple effect is exactly the opposite as the price of XRP skyrockets. How this will end, however, is another question.
