Ripple, the largest holder of XRP tokens in the market, has unlocked one billion XRP tokens at the start of the month, worth over $250 million. The cryptocurrency’s investors fear it’ll put selling pressure on XRP.
According to Twitter bot Whale Alert, the funds were unlocked on September 1, as the company is allowed to unlock up to one billion XRP tokens each month, out of the over 50 it has in its Treasury.
🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 1,000,000,000 #XRP (258,488,781 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 1, 2019
XRP investors have been worried about Ripple selling XRP tokens in the last few weeks, so much so over 2,000 signed a petition asking the company to stop selling tokens and adding selling pressure to the market.
Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse defended the company’s actions on social media, noting Ripple has decreased its sales volume quarter on quarter, and actually helped it incentivize partners.
Currently, the cryptocurrency is already dealing with selling pressure coming from one of the company’s co-founders, Jed McCaleb, who signed an agreement limiting his selling to avoid crashing XRP’s price.
At press time, one XRP token is trading at around $0.257 after rising 0.4% in the last 24-hour period. The cryptocurrency, CryptoCompare data shows, is down by about 19% in the last six months, and 25.8% in the last 12 months.
It’s worth noting both Ripple and Garlinghouse are currently co-defendants in a class action lawsuit where thousands of investors who suffered losses are accusing the company of selling XRP as an unregistered security. Ripple defends itself claiming XRP isn’t a security.