Recently, Whale Alert, a blockchain monitoring organization, reported that Ripple, a renowned crypto payment provider, has shifted 1 billion tokens of XRP, from its escrow account today. All these XRP tokens will have a market value of $513.37 million.
About the Escrow Project
This Ripple’s release of 1 billion XRP was not that surprising for the crypto sector. In 2017, Ripple had already issued a statement that outlined its plans to lock up 55 billion XRP tokens using the Escrow feature on the XRP Ledger.
Ripple Labs has implemented a plan to release 1 billion XRP monthly, beginning in 2018, with the exception of a two-month pause in October-November 2022. This was done in order to incentivize the investors and sustain their interest in the token.
Notably, it is estimated that only 600-700 million XRP of the total released 1 billion XRP tokens are left in circulation. So, it is most likely that a significant amount of the newest XRP supply will be removed from circulation in the near future, possibly before the end of next week.
Response to this Move
The XRP token remains a highly discussed topic in the crypto space, especially since the legal battle between Ripple and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2020.
Recently, in response to this 1 billion token dump, data reveals that XRP has experienced a 5.1% dip in value over the past 24 hours. Nonetheless, the altcoin has made considerable progress in recent weeks – a 19.2% increase in the last week and 32.4% in the last month.