Whale Alert Reports $1B Worth of XRP Tokens Were Sent to Ripple Labs from Unknown Wallets

The transfers were leveraged by some XRP detractors to highlight the token's ties to Ripple Labs.

Four large XRP transfers were detected by Whale Alert on March 15, each involving hundreds of millions of tokens and originating from unknown wallets. The transfers were highlighted by some XRP critics.

According to Whale Alert, a service that tracks large cryptocurrency transfers, a total of a billion XRP tokens were recently sent to Ripple from unknown wallets. The service reported four separate transactions with 430 million, 300 million, 200 million and 70 million tokens.

The transfers were leveraged by some XRP detractors to highlight the token's ties to Ripple Labs.

"As of 2020, according to the SEC complaint, Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse had personally made $600mm from dumping on retail. The number is probably higher now. XRP product market fit is a uniquely terrible thing," Juthica Chou, the head of OTC options trading at Kraken, said.

However, the recent transfers are most likely related to XRP's monthly escrow unlocks given that the total sum is 1 billion tokens. This appears to fully align with the company's monthly release schedule.

Yet, some users were puzzled by the fact that these wallets were labeled as "unknown" given that Ripple's escrow wallets are actually publicly known. This could be due to Whale Alert failing to correctly identify the tokens. Alternatively, Ripple could be using other internal wallets.

As reported by U.Today, the San Francisco-based enterprise blockchain company recently released its Q4 market report, which revealed that the company continues to hold roughly 38 billion tokens in its escrow wallets.

Moreover, Ripple has close to 4.5 billion tokens available in its wallets.

Last month, CEO Garlinghouse stated that the company owned more than $100 billion worth of XRP tokens. This, according to the Ripple boss, indicates that the company's valuation is much higher than the $11 billion figure that was reported by Reuters last year.