Ripple Labs unlocks one billion XRP, dumping it on Coinbase

Data shared by the public on-chain platform Whale Alert, which monitors large cryptocurrency transactions and then shares the details of them on its website and its X account, shows that almost $70 million in XRP were transferred to Coinbase from an anonymous crypto wallet.

Public on-chain platform Whale Alert, which monitors large cryptocurrency transactions and then shares the details of them on its website and its X account, has detected a transfer of almost $70 million in XRP to Coinbase from an anonymous crypto wallet.

Over the past 48 hours, the same source spotted several transactions moving 104.5 million XRP in total, with three major global exchanges involved.

104.5 million XRP moved between anons and top exchanges

The aforesaid data shared that, earlier today, an anonymous whale transferred 29,532,534 XRP to the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency trader, Coinbase.

The amount of crypto was equal to $69,892,707.

Even though the sending wallet was marked as anonymous, details unveiled by XRP-focused explorer Bithomp show that the sender was actually a wallet that belongs to Coinbase. This makes it not a deposit but an internal transfer, as the platform has been reshuffling its XRP holdings.

"This is an internal transfer as the coin was sent from a Coinbase wallet to another Coinbase wallet," Bithomp stated.

The other two transactions detected by Whale Alert carried 25,000,000 XRP and 50,000,000 XRP, valued at $67,301,682 and $147,488,426 at the time of the initiated transactions.

A total of 25 million XRP were withdrawn from major South Korean exchange Upbit and transferred to an anonymous wallet, while 50 million XRP were deposited to another major Korean exchange, Bithumb. The aforementioned explorer confirmed that these were not internal XRP movements, and these sums were genuinely initiated by unknown XRP holders.

Another tremendous XRP movement took place on Sunday, March 2.

As reported by U.Today, on that day, Ripple behemoth released 1,000,000,000 XRP from escrow, moving that amount of crypto in several batches.

Ripple traditionally unlocks that many coins in a single day and has been doing so since 2017, releasing one billion on the first day of every new month to support the coin’s liquidity on the market.

This time, however, it was done after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his approval of the creation of the U.S. Strategic Crypto Reserve. This reserve would include not only the two largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also top altcoins - XRP, ADA and SOL.

While many Bitcoin maxis were filled with indignation about anything except Bitcoin being included in it, curiously, one of the biggest Bitcoin evangelists, Strategy’s Michael Saylor, considered XRP’s inclusion as a bullish sign.