Ripple moves 100 million unlocked XRP amid price crash

Ripple has moved 100 million XRP from the 200 million kept from September’s 1 billion XRP token unlock. From that, 72 million tokens passed through five different accounts before being deposited in small batches to four different exchanges, indicating they were sold.

Notably, this possible sell-off of the freshly released XRP tokens happened amid a general price crash that devastated the cryptocurrency market on September 11, in a growing fear of FTX liquidations, which includes dozens of millions of dollars in XRP. Besides that, XRP itself has lost over $1 billion in market cap in the last few days.

Ripple moves 100 million in a possible sell-off on September 11. Source: Finbold (Vini Barbosa).

Again, in less than one minute, the 72 million XRP was sent to an unknown address “r4wf7…h4Rzn”. This is the last stopping point for the recently unlocked tokens, just before being sent to four different known addresses of centralized exchanges (CEX).

Bitstamp received 39.875 million XRP, Bitso received 22.78 million XRP, Independent Reserves received 8.65 million XRP, and BTC Markets 500,000 XRP. Summing up to a total of 71.805 million tokens being deposited in CEXes, which usually means an intention to sell.

XRP transactions out of “r4wf7…h4Rzn” to CEX addresses. Source: XRP Scan

One last unknown address “rsdkG…apapb” received 925,000 XRP, resulting in an extra 730,000 XRP being moved from the forwarded 72 million.

Interestingly, the extra amount came from what is an unplanned sent from “rhWt2…E32hk” to “rJgpQ…7hCvf”. This, plus the short interval between each transaction, could indicate that all the addresses moving the 72 million XRP belong to the same entity — but this can not be verified.