The XRP price is currently bucking the general market trend and is recording a small gain of around 2% over the last 24 hours. What is noticeable are massive movements by whales over the past few hours.
The cryptocurrency market is on shaky ground given the macroeconomic headwinds and the still not fully digested shock from the FTX collapse.
However, XRP investors don’t seem to care at the moment. On the other hand, data suggests that possibly whales have played their part in this development.
XRP Whales Surface
As the popular cryptocurrency tracker Whale Alert reports, a total amount of 160.6 million XRP was transferred over the past 24 hours. One transaction in particular is causing quite a stir.
According to WhaleAlert, Ripple transferred 50 million XRP from one of its wallets to an unknown wallet. The transaction is currently the subject of a heated debate, with some believing that Ripple may sell some of the XRP they hold.
🚨 50,000,000 #XRP (19,289,010 USD) transferred from Ripple to unknown wallethttps://t.co/72jMidOgOL
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 7, 2022
An analysis using Bithomp shows that the cryptocurrency was moved to another wallet of the company (RL18-VN), which is normally used to move or sell the token outside the company.
In addition, whales transferred 35.6 million tokens from Bitstamp to an unknown wallet, as well as 40 million XRP worth about $15.3 million to the European exchange Bitstamp.
The Bitso exchange is one of Ripple’s oldest On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) partners, covering one of the most important payment corridors in Latin America: U.S.-Mexico.
The Bitstamp whale is linked to the U.S. exchange Bitrex, from where the transfer was made.
Remarkably, these whale transactions follow an even much larger series of transactions totaling 4.1 billion XRP yesterday, Wednesday. According to WhaleAlert and Bithomp, these tokens were transferred from Bittrex to Uphold, divided into 10 transactions with a maximum size of 500 million units.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 500,000,000 #XRP (188,355,483 USD) transferred from #Bittrex to unknown wallethttps://t.co/IkmoFxoP3Y
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 7, 2022
The reason behind the transfer is unclear, though it does not look like the transaction was made by an individual.
XRP/USD Shows Strength
At press time, the XRP price was sitting at $0.3859. The 24-hour trading volume currently hovers around $712 million.
With a market cap of $19.4 billion, XRP remains the seventh largest cryptocurrency.
In the 4-hour chart, the price of the token has managed to continue its uptrend after the FTX crash. Yesterday, the price marked a new higher low, confirming the uptrend.
For the moment, the most important resistance zone remains the area between $0.41 and $0.42. However, at the current price, XRP is still below the 50, 100 and 200 simple moving averages (SMAs).
For the bulls, it will be important to defend the uptrend line in the coming days.
