Ripple Releases $1B XRP from Escrow Wallet

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Teuta Franjkovic
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Ripple has unlocked one billion XRP from its escrow wallet on Sunday. It represents the supply issuance for the month in the agreement with its pre-decided schedule.

At present estimations, this adds up to approximately $225 million. Right now, XRP is finding itself in a pretty much heavy position regarding its price. At the time of writing it is trading $0.22 (0.49% up within 24 hours). However, if it would fall and kept itself on a support zone of 0.20$, this could mean serious trouble for the third-largest digital currency.

It seems Ripple unlocks December 2017 when it officially announced that it is putting 55 billion XRP into an escrow wallet and will be releasing 1 billion XRP every month in order to speed up the XRP liquidity. As per Ripple’s blog at the time, it opined that long term, the value of digital assets will be determined by their utility.

Ripple then said:

“XRP has emerged as the only digital asset with a clear institutional use case designed to solve a multi-trillion dollar problem – the global payment and liquidity challenges that banks, payment providers and corporates face.”

Be it as it may, this month’s release of funds presented a new tranche of $220 million worth of XRP that became accessible for Ripple to use as they see appropriate.

If we take the fact that the crypto market again fell in some kind of a bearish phase and that this year was pretty much troublesome for altcoins, with every new fund unlocking XRP holders have another reason to be worried.

The thing is, every time escrow funds are released it is frequently identified with a price approaching the fall since the XRP can be dispersed right on the market. This month’s funds release brings the circulation of the total supply close to 44 billion.

And while some altcoins have been kind of consolidated in a way, XRP has had its ‘status quo’ status during the last month when it also tends to fall. On November 9-11, Ripple decided to hold its “conference of the year” in Singapore.

However, even though during the previous two conferences in 2017 and 2018, the price of XRP jumped notably in expectation of the event. In 2019, however, this hasn’t happened, since the XRP price did not see any significant movement.

Still, there have been some small upward developments for Ripple last week. It increased its equity stake in MoneyGram International. At first, Ripple started with a $30 million investment in this money transfer company in June.

On November 25, Ripple revealed it is up to invest another $20 million, which brought its stake in MoneyGram to 9.95%. As part of the buying deal, Ripple also acquired warrants with which he is enabled that, if it decides, in the future, it can rise up its stake to around 15%.

However, XRP was pretty much mentioned in the negative kind of way last month.

The blockchain sleuthing firm Elliptic discovered $400M in illicit XRP transactions.

“Regardless of the amount, it just demonstrates that there is illicit activity going on in this coin. Therefore, if you are a business handling some of these transactions then you need to be checking for it because you don’t want to be the organization that’s being used to launder those proceeds”,  said Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of Elliptic.

Author: Teuta Franjkovic

Experienced creative professional focusing on financial and political analysis, editing daily newspapers and news sites, economical and political journalism, consulting, PR and Marketing. Teuta’s passion is to create new opportunities and bring people together.

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