58 Million XRP in 13 Hours – What’s Happening?

Data publicly shared by popular blockchain sleuth Whale Alert shows that two large XRP chunks have been transferred to leading exchanges Binance and Bitstamp.

58.2 million XRP lands on top exchanges

According to the aforementioned data source, over the last 13 hours, the two top cryptocurrency exchanges were stunned with large XRP deposits. Binance received 33,000,000 XRP, while Bitstamp saw 25,270,000 XRP move into one of its wallets.

🚨 33,000,000 #XRP (19,734,848 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Binancehttps://t.co/FYFeDRTOuq

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) August 21, 2024

These are the equivalents of $19,734,848 and $15,191,832 in fiat, and both were initiated by anonymous blockchain wallets. The deposit to Binance was the most recent one as it took place three hours ago, and it brought on a large number of comments, where X users attempted to guess the goal of this deposit. Many expect this to be a sale, to be made by an unknown cryptocurrency whale.

However, details shared by the XRP-focused explorer Bithomp show that the Binance transaction was made internally. The anonymous wallet that conducted them was linked to the crypto exchange. As for the deposit made to Bitstamp, it was conducted from a digital wallet associated with the Ripple cryptocurrency behemoth. Bitstamp is among the exchanges that collaborate with Ripple, helping it to perform transnational payments via RippleNet.

SEC may appeal Ripple’s court victories: Ripple CLO

Recently, Ripple’s chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty, conversing with securities law professor J.W. Verret, assumed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may well appeal the decision of the federal court regarding XRP’s status.

Last July, Federal Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sales on cryptocurrency exchanges conducted by Ripple did not qualify as securities, unlike sales made by the company to financial institutions. This decision by the court briefly helped the XRP price to increase.

This year, the court again made a ruling in favor of Ripple after the securities regulator requested $2 billion in fines and penalties to be paid by the blockchain giant. The court decided that $125 million would be a fair amount to be paid in this case. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse bragged about this as a major victory for Ripple and the whole cryptocurrency space.

However, now, many experts believe that the SEC may appeal the court’s decision. Still, Alderoty believes that even if the regulator does appeal, the court’s verdict will hardly be different.

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