This year has seen a general lull in whale activity on the XRP Ledger when compared to 2021 and 2022, although key shark and whale addresses have nevertheless kept on accumulating the network’s native token, $XRP.
That’s according to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, which noted that wallets with between 100,000 and 100 million XRP now hold $7.89 billion in the network’s token, compared to roughly $7.16 billion a year ago, meaning they now control roughly 26.8% of the cryptocurrency’s supply.
Santiment’s post also notes that the XRP Ledger is now averaging under 4,000 transactions of over $100,000 per week, below its historical norms. The demininshed whale activity may nevertheless raise eyebrows among some market observers, positing a cautionary tale of dwindling broader interest or perhaps a shift in focus towards other burgeoning digital assets.
The ongoing accumulation by key addresses, despite the slowdown in whale activity, may reflect a potential long-term outlook rather than a short-term trading focus, akin to the age-old investment adage – “The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.”
As CryptoGlobe reported, Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz has recently revealed that his late father bought “over a million XRP” in April of 2014 for just $0.005 per token, sparking a cascade of reactions, with most fueled by the potential returns of such an early investment into the cryptocurrency.
It’s noteworthy that this investment was made at a time when XRP was trading near its historical lows, a fact corroborated by market data from that period. The cryptocurrency’s price had traded at $0.061 in December 2013, shortly before it started enduring a correction that saw it drop to that level.
Notably, the price of XRP is now $0.521, which means that the investment of an estimated $5,000, which were enough to acquire 1 million tokens at the price of $0.005 each, would have now ballooned to around $520,000.
The tokens were notably worth over $3.3 million at the time of the cryptocurrency’s all-time high, which means at one point the acquisition was at one point seeing returns of over 65,000%. At the time of writing – assuming Schwartz hasn’t divested of the tokens – the returns are of over 10,300%.
Naturally, as any analyst will point out, past performance is not indicative of future results. Therefore, investors should always do their own research and due diligence before making any financial decisions. While historical data can provide some insights and trends, it cannot guarantee or predict the future performance of any asset or market.
Featured image via Pixabay.
