Whales on the $XRP Ledger have been moving a significant amount of tokens over the last few days after rapidly accumulating a significant percentage of the cryptocurrency’s supply over the past five weeks.
As reported by Daily Hodl, whale monitoring service Whale Alert has flagged $XRP transactions moving more than 70 million tokens to cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp as 2022 came to an end, before pointing to another transaction moving nearly 150 million tokens between two unknown wallets.
Both wallets are unidentified on XRP Ledger explorer Bithomp, and with their addition, $XRP whales have been found to move more than $74 million worth of the cryptocurrency in only a few days, shortly after 500 million tokens were unlocked from escrow.
As CryptoGlobe reported, whale addresses on the $XRP Ledger, holding between 100,000 and 10 million tokens have increased their holdings rapidly over the last five weeks, going from 16.7% of the cryptocurrency’s supply to 18.3%.
$XRP whales started adding to their holdings at the end of September and early October, when the price of the cryptocurrency started surging as both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple Labs started looking to end their legal battle.
The SEC sued Ripple and two of its executives in 2020, alleging they sold unregistered securities when they issued $1.3 billion worth of XRP tokens. Ripple denies XRP is a security.
Earlier this year, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse noted that he believed the company would prevail in its legal battle against the regulator. Over the past few weeks, a number of influential cryptocurrency firms, including Coinbase and the Blockchain Association, filed to support Ripple.
As CryptoGlobe reported, cryptocurrency investment products offering exposure to XRP have seen seeing significant inflows as the SEC’s case against Ripple has started being seen as “increasingly fragile” by investors.
Ripple settling the lawsuit could lead to an XRP supply shock, which presumably would lead to a price surge as demand would remain the same, while supply plunged. That’s according to legal expert and XRP supporter Jeremy Hogan, who has been following the case.
Hogan has recently weighed in on a ruling by the United States District Court in favor of the SEC against blockchain-based file-sharing network LBRY. The court LBRY violated securities laws by selling its native LBC tokens without registering with the Sec. Per Hogan, the results could make their way into the SEC’s final brief in the Ripple case.
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