500 Million XRP Moved, Unlikely To Turn Into Selling Pressure

The XRP news today show that even 500 million in XRP was moved and now it is very unlikely for this to turn into selling pressure. On March 1, we can see that the millions of Ripple tokens were unlocked from the Ripple Escrow Wallet, worth around $115 million. Whether this translates to selling pressure for the cryptocurrency still remains to be seen.

As a reminder, in the fourth quarter of 2019, Ripple sold the least amount of XRP in recent years, alleviating some pressure off of the XRP markets. The Q4 report read:

“Ripple continued the pause of programmatic sales, focusing solely on our over-the-counter (OTC) sales with a few strategic partners, who are building XRP utility and liquidity in strategic regions including EMEA and Asia.”

The XRP which Ripple obtains from the Escrow wallet can be sold in the exchange market, be distributed to its partners or be held for long periods of time. According to market data, there is no clear correlation between the movement of XRP out of the escrow wallet and the price trend of the cryptocurrency.

For instance, the 500 million XRP were unlocked on February 1. Yet, from February 1 to February 8 (in just a week) the price of XRP in the cryptocurrency news rose by around 18%. This is why Ripple is not moving in line with the sell offs and another proof that the company had not sold large amounts of XRP after the escrow was released.

It is now entirely possible that the price of XRP simply increased because Bitcoin rallied from $8,000 to $10,500. However, the escrow movement and the 500 million indicated minimal effect on the price of XRP.

The CEO of Ripple Brad Garlinghouse noted that it is not in the interest of Ripple to see XRP performing poorly. Hence, he explained that Ripple would not want to dump a significant amount of XRP to the market.

“We are clearly interested in a healthy, successful XRP ecosystem, and we would never do that,” he said during the interview.

The main difference between the current price trend of XRP and the one in February is that the overall market sentiment is on the decline. During a market slump like this, even a slight increase of selling pressure could affect the market.

“XRP sales are about helping expand XRP’s utility – building RippleNet & supporting other biz building w/XRP ie Dharma & Forte. Reality is we decreased our sales by volume Q/Q and since then the inflation rate of XRP circulating supply has been lower than that of BTC and ETH,” Garlinghouse previously said.