Ripple Locks 800M XRP After Releasing 1B Coins, Price Surges Over 1% in 24 Hours

Ripple Labs continues its monthly token unlock program, with 800 million XRP deposited in its escrow account shortly after releasing 1 billion coins.

Ripple Labs has unlocked a whopping 1 billion XRP coins from its escrow accounts as part of its routine procedure. Leading whale tracking service Whale Alert shared details of the transactions in a series of tweets yesterday.

Ripple Unlocks 1B XRP From Escrow

According to Whale Alert, Ripple unlocked the 1 billion XRP coins in three transactions yesterday at around 00:00 UTC. For the first transaction, the payments behemoth released 400 million XRP worth $205.91 million.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 400,000,000 #XRP (205,914,675 USD) unlocked from escrow at #Ripplehttps://t.co/V54DFtoI16

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 1, 2023

A few seconds later, Ripple Labs unlocked another 100M XRP from the same escrow account. The value of the 100M XRP at the time of the transaction was worth $51.47 million.

? ? ? 100,000,000 #XRP (51,478,668 USD) unlocked from escrow at #Ripplehttps://t.co/P8BgPU21Hr

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 1, 2023

Lastly, Ripple released another 500 million XRP from one of its escrow accounts. It bears mentioning that the 500M XRP, worth $257.39 million, was released from a different escrow account. However, the account is still owned by Ripple Labs.

800M XRP Put Back in Escrow

In the latest development, Ripple locked back the majority of XRP coins it recently released from escrow. According to Whale Alerts data, the leading blockchain company put back 800M coins out of the 1B XRP to its escrow account.

Notably, Ripple locked back the 800M XRP in three different transactions, with each containing 500M, 200M, and 100M XRP, respectively. 

Ripple’s decision to lock back 800M XRP in escrow is part of the company’s effort to stabilize the coin’s price.

Ripple XRP Monthly Unlock Program

Meanwhile, the development is part of Ripple’s monthly token unlock initiative, which started in 2017. Ripple usually releases and relocks massive amounts of XRP coins monthly. These transactions are usually carried out on the first day of each new month.

The rationale behind the monthly XRP unlock initiative is to control the release of XRP into the market and to keep the price stable.

Out of the 100 billion XRP initially created, 20 billion were initially distributed to Ripple’s co-founders and the core team.

Most XRP coins were sold in secondary markets via blind bid/ask transactions. On the other hand, Ripple sold some amounts of XRP to clients of On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), a solution for instant cross-border settlement.

At press time, XRP’s current supply stands at 53,312,364,216 (53.31 billion), according to CoinGecko data.

XRP Up Over 1% in 24 Hours

Ripple’s latest XRP unlock exercise did not negatively impact the price of the coin.

In the hours leading up to press time, XRP was up 1.1% over the past 24 hours to $0.522, according to CoinGecko data. This is in contrast to what was reported last month. As reported earlier, the price of XRP dipped 3% shortly after Ripple unlocked 1B XRP from escrow.

Ripple Moves 75M, as Unknown Whale Shuffles 28.5M XRP

In other news, XRP whales were active over the past day, shuffling over 100 million coins in two transactions.

A few minutes before Ripple’s monthly XRP unlock, the company moved 75 million XRP to one of its wallets, activated on October 27, 2021. At press time, the recipient address has a balance of 79.464 million XRP coins.

? ? 75,000,000 #XRP (38,696,868 USD) transferred from #Ripple to unknown wallethttps://t.co/DQUdNl6f0a

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 30, 2023

Yesterday, an unknown whale deposited 28.5M XRP, worth $14.73 million, to Bitstamp crypto exchange.

? 28,500,000 #XRP (14,739,997 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Bitstamphttps://t.co/hmT9zn0T3C

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 1, 2023