The new year hasn’t even started out yet and there are already massive whale alerts going off in the crypto space. Today, there was a Whale Alert Twitter account that detected a huge amount of XRP released by Ripple to its so-called Funding Wallet 1.
The Funding Wallet 1 was created by Ripple’s co-founder and Silicon Valley VC Chris Larsen. However, many in the crypto space believe that this wallet actually belongs to him as well.
It is some sort of a tradition for Ripple to release large amounts of XRP periodically. This outrages the larger community, as the company essentially controls the supply and demand for XRP and fully controls how investors receive new coins. This time is no different. The XRP investors are outraged that the company is beginning 2020 in such a “massive” way.
The balance of the wallet currently amounts to roughly $266 million worth of XRP. The currency was released in tranches.
During New Year’s eve, more XRP was released to the public – around 1 billion coins were transferred from Ripple’s escrow wallet to the market. What happens is that this act is performed on the first day of each month and soo after – a very large amount of the XRP is sent back to Ripple’s wallet.
So, together with the $256 million XRP release to Larsen’s wallet, the total amount of released XRP is around $240,869,752.
According to CoinMarketCap, the current price of XRP right now is $0.19, as XRP has struggled to regain its highs of $0.30 recently.