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- Whale Alert has reported an XRP transaction of 25 million XRP from an unknown wallet to the exchange Bitstamp.
- The owner of the wallet is not known, speculations range from Jed McCaleb to Ripple themselves.
Within the XRP community a massive transaction of 24.99 million XRP tokens is currently causing a stir. According to Whale Alert, an automated blockchain data tracker, 24,999,995 XRP worth $5.2 million were sent to the European crypto exchange Bitstamp by an unknown wallet.
24,999,995 #XRP (5,217,224 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Bitstamp
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 10, 2020
The origin of this XRP is uncertain. Accordingly, speculation is currently seething about whom the XRP tokens might belong to. As a matter of fact, XRP tokens were distributed for free to the Ripple founders in the early days. In recent months, the sales of Jed McCaleb, the current technical director of the Stellar Lumens project, have been in the spotlight. As reported by CNF, McCaleb still holds 4.7 billion XRP tokens, despite numerous sales of a total of one million XRP.
According to research by Whale Alert, McCaleb has sold more than one billion XRP almost exclusively through Bitstamp since 2014. In this respect, it seems obvious that McCaleb is once again responsible for the current Whale transaction, but there is no evidence for this.
Is Ripple behind the transaction?
An analysis of the origin of the XRP tokens also shows that they were activated by BitGo in August 2019 and were held in the wallet. In addition, the wallet sent XRP tokens to Bitstamp several times last year. This in turn could also speak for Ripple as the origin. Bitstamp was one of the first Ripple Gateways and the first partner in Ripple’s incentive program.
Most recently, both entered into a partnership for the XRP based On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) payment solution. In addition, Ripple itself had sent 220,303,137 XRP worth $49.28 million to Bitstamp in December, although Ripple also stated in its last quarterly report that it had stopped selling XRP on crypto exchanges.
Nevertheless, Ripple’s XRP sales are suspected by the community to increase selling pressure on XRP, forcing investors to sell XRP. As a result, the price of XRP could be negatively affected in the long term, whereby some critics explain the persistent stagnating performance of XRP. Although Ripple has always rejected these allegations and stated that the quantities are too small to influence the price of XRP, the company has not been able to prove that this is the case. Yet, Ripple has never really been able to dispel the doubts.
At the time of writing, XRP’s price is posting a slight gain of 0.8 percent over the past 24 hours. However, the monthly chart shows a minus of 25.5 percent due the crash on the entire crypto market.
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