Once a month, one billion XRP coins get unlocked from Ripple’s escrow wallet, which ensures that the company’s large stash of the cryptocurrency (over one-third of the total supply of the asset) does not get depleted too fast.
Ripple just unlocked one billion XRP from escrow. The amount is worth approximately $226 million. This move has been spotted by cryptocurrency whale watchers and now the question is up again regarding the quantity of the XRP the San Francisco-based startup is selling on a monthly basis.
Ripple holds more than half of the total supply of XRP in its portfolio and has decelerated its sales of the cryptocurrency to third parties in the last few months.
🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 500,000,000 #XRP (115,933,402 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 1, 2020
In February, a Ripple-owned wallet that is used only in order to sell its own holdings to institutions over-the-counter was pretty much active. It sent 75,202,210 XRP worth $17 million to wallets of unknown origin. The exact amount Ripple has sold will be publicly known when the company releases its Q1 summing up of its crypto asset allocations.
The latest numbers that can be seen, show Ripple sold $13.08 million worth of XRP in the fourth quarter of last year. That represents a massive fall from previous quarters. Ripple sold a total of $66.24 million in XRP in the third quarter of last year, $251.51 million in the second quarter and $169.42 million in the first quarter.
Ripple Pausing ‘Programmatic’ XRP Sales
Additionally, Ripple said it stalled “programmatic” sales of XRP on cryptocurrency exchanges in the third and fourth quarters of last year. However, the sales schedule for 2020 is still not known.
The company said:
“…Ripple continued the pause of programmatic sales, focusing solely on our over-the-counter (OTC) sales with a few strategic partners, who are building XRP utility and liquidity in strategic regions including EMEA and Asia.”
Two weeks ago there was a scandal when XRP suffered a flash crash to $0.15 on BitMEX. That bewildered many traders on the exchange, especially because BitMEX, has not pledged to return funds to those affected. The exchange’s CEO is known for calling XRP ‘a turd,’ but he still listed the cryptocurrency, due to its high trading volume.
Deliberately Rising the Numbers of Its Customers on Site?
One interesting thing happened few weeks ago when an XRP community member noticed that the figure showing the number of Ripple’s customers on its website totaled 450. Compared to fall 2019, that would mean that the number of companies who are working with the San-Francisco-based blockchain company had increased a lot. However, approximately an hour later, this information was changed back to the previous figure – 300, which was officially announced by Brad Garlinghouse back in November last year.
We recently also wrote about how a federal judge from California has ruled against the request from Ripple to stop a class-action lawsuit that claims the company sold XRP to its customers as an unregistered security. This means the case will go ahead as planned initially, a big blow to the XRP and Ripple community at large.
Ripple had requested to stop the lawsuit back in December 2019, where Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton disagreed with them back on January 16. In her words, “based on the plaintiff’s complaint and judiciary noticeable facts proffered, the court cannot conclude that the defendants’ first bona fide public offer to sell XRP occurred before August 5, 2016”.
Since then, a technical correction during the recent period plunged the XRP price down by approximately 36 percent. However, at the time of writing, XRP was up 0.66% to $0.23.
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