Large XRP token holders, colloquially known as whales, have seemingly been accumulating the native token of the XRP Ledger to the point they now control 67.2% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply, the largest amount since December 31, 2022.
According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, the price of XRP is currently at risk of falling below the $0.50 mark for the first time since October, at a time in which whale transactions worth over $1 million on the network spiked to 217 in a single day.
🐳 After an #altcoin slide Wednesday, #XRPLedger is at risk of falling below a $0.50 market value for the first time since October 19th. Interestingly, however, yesterday had the most $XRP $1M+ whale transactions on the network (217) since prices skyrocketed after a
(Cont) 👇 pic.twitter.com/1xa0PHCzcb
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) January 31, 2024
The firm noted that the figures correspondents to the highest number of whale transactions above the $1 million mark in a single day since Judge Analisa Torres of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a complex ruling in the SEC vs Ripple Labs lawsuit, which accused the fintech firm and two of its executives – Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse – of unlawfully offering and selling unregistered securities, XRP.
Judge Torres elaborated that Larsen’s and Garlinghouse’s XRP sales were programmatic and executed through blind bid/ask transactions on digital asset exchanges. She stated that these transactions did not fulfill the criteria to be considered investment contracts under the Howey Test.
She also clarified that XRP, as a digital token, did not inherently meet the Howey requirements for an investment contract. Additionally, she noted that secondary market sales of XRP could not be classified as investment contracts since the funds did not trace back to Ripple.
Santiment added that there are some “key signals” indicating that XRO “is one of the better candidates for a bounce.” XRP is at the time of writing trading at $0.506 after losing around 1% of its value over the past week.
Featured image via Pixabay.
