Ripple moves 60m tokens from October unlock; Will it impact XRP?

Ripple moved 60 million XRP ($30 million) on October 9, from the 200 million kept from this month’s 1 billion XRP token unlock. These tokens were then distributed and passed through five different accounts before being deposited in small batches to four exchanges indicating they were sold.

Notably, during this possible sell-off from part of the freshly released XRP tokens, the price of the XRP/USD pair on Bitstamp — one of the exchanges that received 33.15 million out of the 60 million spent — suffered a massive dump from $0.50 to $0.458 (-8.5%), around the same time when everything happened.

XRP/USD 4-hour price chart on Bitstamp. Source: TradingView

Ripple 60 million XRP trail. Source: XRP Scan and Finbold

Does Ripple moving unlocked tokens impact the XRP price?

Despite not having a conclusive answer on how much Ripple moving freshly unlocked tokens can impact the XRP price, it is known that extra selling pressures can liquidate book orders if they involve a relevant amount of assets in comparison to its exchanged volume.

Bitstamp received 33.15 million (50%) of this first October’s sell-off, which was enough for an 8.5% price drop. Bitso received 21.40 million XRP, while Independent Reserves received 9.15 million and BTC Markets 1.40 million tokens.

XRP is being traded at $0.49 per token at the time of publication, but Ripple still has 140 million ($70 million) tokens that could be spent in the following days. This could create new localized selling pressures like the one observed yesterday.