A massive cryptocurrency whale has recently moved 210 million tokens of the XRP Ledger’s native asset, $XRP, out of leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance in a surprising move that set the token’s community abuzz.
According to whale monitoring service Whale Alert, the whale moved nearly 42 million XRP to an unidentified cryptocurrency wallet before making several other transactions moving XRP out of the leading exchange.
Notably, some members of the XRP community found ties between the addresses being used and Binance, implying a possible internal operational maneuver by the exchange. Some blockchain analytics platforms have tagged the receiving wallets as belonging to Binance, although it’s unclear whether these were indeed internal transactions.
A review of Binance’s $XRP transactions tagged by whale monitoring services shows a plethora of large XRP withdrawals to external wallets, further supporting the theory that the exchange is simply moving funds between its wallets. In total, over 210 million XRP, worth over $100 million has left Binance’s known wallets this month.
The transactions comes as the XRP Ledger is gearing up for several new upgrades, including the potential introductions of a built-in automated market maker (AMM) trading platform into the ledger, allowing $XRP token holders to earn income on-chain.
An AMM is a platform that allows for cryptocurrency trading in a permissionless way using liquidity pools, rather than traditional order books. Liquidity pools are shared pools of two or more tokens supplied by users that are used for trades. The prices of tokens within the pool are determined through the use of blockchain oracles.
Investors who add tokens to liquidity pools receive a share of the fees collected from each trade, but the revenue comes with the risk of impermanent loss. Impermanent loss occurs when price fluctuations alter the ratio of the tokens within the pool, meaning token providers could be better off if they simply held the tokens in their wallets.
The Ledger is also set to soon boost its transaction throughput from around 1,500 transactions per second to an impressive 3,400 transactions per second (TPS), bolstered by upgrades that are soon set to be deployed.
Featured image via Unsplash.
