Ripple recently released 1 billion XRP tokens to address liquidity demands for May but shortly thereafter returned 700 million tokens to escrow. According to Whale Alert, a reputable source for tracking large cryptocurrency transactions, the return transactions occurred about 16 hours after the initial release of the tokens.
Yesterday at midnight (UTC), Ripple released 1 billion XRP tokens from escrow in two separate transactions, each involving 500 million XRP. The Crypto Basic previously reported this.
Ripple moved 300 million XRP tokens to another of its wallets 16 hours after releasing the first batch of 500 million tokens to meet liquidity demands for the current month. The remaining 200 million XRP tokens from the initial 500 million were returned to the escrow wallet and locked. This represents the total amount of tokens moved by Ripple.
After releasing the first 500 million XRP tokens and transferring 300 million to another wallet, Ripple returned the second batch of 500 million tokens to the escrow wallet 16 hours later without releasing any of them to the market. Soon after returning these tokens, Ripple locked them up on May 1 at 16:31 (UTC).
In summary, Ripple returned a total of 700 million XRP tokens to the escrow wallet and released 300 million tokens to address liquidity demands. Still, these tokens have not been moved and remain in the recipient’s address. As a result, the recipient address now holds a total of 746 million XRP tokens.
It’s worth noting that in April, the address that received 300 million XRP tokens only sent out 50 million XRP tokens and kept the remaining assets.
Related Reading: Ripple Market Summary For the Past 30 Days; Will XRP Hit $0.7 in the Next 30 Days?
When Ripple’s XRP Escrows Run Out, What Happens?
It’s common for Ripple to conduct similar transfers every month, and this recent transaction is not an exception. The Silicon Valley-based company has been carrying out similar practices since 2018. For instance, in February, Ripple locked back 600 million XRP tokens and released 400 million to the market.
As a reminder, 55 billion XRP tokens were initially locked up in escrow. Mathematically speaking, these escrow accounts will eventually exhaust their XRP token supply. Supporters have posed the question of what will happen when this occurs. David Schwartz, CTO at Ripple, has responded to this question on Quora.
Schwartz has acknowledged that the company will eventually run out of the initial supply of XRP allocated to it by the XRP Ledger founders. However, he noted that the company would have developed other revenue sources and business models to sustain itself by that time.
He stated that Ripple’s goal is to distribute XRP to the market. According to the report, Ripple sold $2.93 billion worth of XRP to its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) partners in the first quarter of this year. Schwartz emphasized that when the XRP held in Ripple’s escrow runs out, it will signify that the company has successfully distributed the assets.
