According to Whale Alert, Ripple has unlocked the XRP tokens from accounts labeled ‘unknown.’ However, data from the XRP explorer Bithomp reveals that Ripple owns the “unknown” accounts.
The Ripple Token Unlock Details
Ripple released the 1 billion XRP tokens in three separate transactions, reports Whale Alert. At 12:01 a.m. today, Ripple unlocked 300,000,000 XRP, or $121.62,000,000, for the first transaction. A little while later, Ripple unlocked 200 million more XRP ($81.08 million) from escrow.
Read: Ripple and Central Bank Digital Currencies: What You Need to Know
It’s important to note that Ripple sent the two transactions, totaling 500 million XRP, to one of its addresses. The address currently holds 1 billion XRP tokens in its possession at the time of writing.
Ripple also distributed an additional 500,000,000 XRP tokens from its escrow account. At the time of the transaction, the 500 million XRP tokens were worth about $200.7 million.
In contrast to the previous two transactions, Ripple sent the funds to a different address that belonged to the blockchain company. The address now owns 1 billion XRP, according to data from XRP explorer Bithomp.
In past months, Ripple often locked back a sizable chunk of the newly released tokens in its escrow account. In other cases, the Silicon Valley tech company locks back at least 80% of the newly released XRP tokens in escrow, while the remaining 20% is used to support the firm’s daily operations.
Considering this, Ripple has made any move after releasing 1 billion XRP from escrow. The tokens have yet to be transferred to entities utilizing Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service as of the time of writing. Ripple has also refrained from adding the tokens to cryptocurrency exchanges.
XRP Up 0.8% in 24 Hours
However, the recent token unlock did not affect the price of XRP. Data from Coingecko shows that XRP is currently trading at around $0.4040, up 0.8% in the last 24 hours.
The transactions occurred a day after Ripple’s “Q4 2022 markets report” was released. As previously mentioned, Ripple revealed that its overall XRP sales in Q4 2022, at around $2.9B, were nearly $100M higher than Q3’s.
