San Francisco-based digital assets company Ripple today unlocked one billion XRP tokens following the company’s monthly escrow unlock. This common phenomenon, which occurred in the middle of the night at the break between October 31st and November 1st, contributed to a bearish end of October for the XRP token. The transaction was performed in three stages through two Ripple addresses, according to the blockchain monitoring service Whale Alert.
The first Ripple address, called “rw2…3wY,” was allocated 500 million of XRP in two transactions. The first one was 400 million XRP, equivalent to $ 203.7 million, and the second transfer was 100 million XRP and worth $ 50.94 million. Notably, this address has not been used for a month prior to these transactions, which is a typical pattern observed in Ripple’s escrow addresses.
The second address, “rDq…EsF,” was the other address that got the rest of the 500-million XRP, which is worth about $254.7 million. This takes the total XRP released for the month of November to one standard one billion tokens. At the reporting time, both addresses still keep their tokens with balances of 1 billion XRP in each address. This is in line with Ripple’s normal procedure once an escrow is opened, as the majority of the released tokens are locked back into escrow within the next few hours.
As has been the tradition, these addresses are most probably going to transfer out the assets later today, with Ripple likely to lock back 800 million and hold back 200 million XRP for business operations. Thus, to address the concern of flooding of the market with XRP by Ripple, this company developed this monthly escrow unlock cycle with this goal: to help bring predictability to the supply of this method.
This latest escrow unlock comes at a very difficult time for XRP in the market. The token ended the October with a substantial down of 16.74%, which is the biggest monthly loss since April. After rising to 0.53$ on October 29, XRP repeated a correction of 3.71% within two days. Currently, XRP is at $0.5138 and during the morning hours XRP has increased by only 0.98% during the latest update.
According to market analysis, it is important for XRP to start moving towards its 50-day SMA at $ 0.5543 to turn bullish. Unfortunately, the current market downturn has impacted not only XRP but virtually all crypto-currencies including the market leader Bitcoin and other major alt-coins.
Some of its participants are anxious that such escrow might affect both the value of XRP and the general attitude of the market participants toward it. Where some might consider these consistent token releases as a source of ‘dumping’, the conventionalists believe that the cradle of the token releases is healthy for a stable long-term market anticipation.
Given the current state of the cryptocurrency market, occurrences like Ripple escrow unlocks are always important to appreciate different token economies and the ways they supply management. These two factors should be taken into consideration together with other trends in the cryptocurrency market and regulation of this industry by governments and other countries’ regulatory authorities when traders and investors make their decisions about where investments are made.
