Ripple Releases 1Billion XRP from Escrow as 2022 Gets Underway

Ripple, a blockchain-powered digital payment network, has released one billion XRP tokens, a portion of which will be used for business operations. On the first calendar day of every month, this routine is carried out. For the last few years, the XRP token release has been carried out in two tranches of 500 million coins at the same instance.

Due to the fact that these XRP releases from the escrow are preprogrammed, they are carried out automatically since 2017. The actual idea was to systematically release 55 billion XRP from escrow, implying the monthly transactions will likely end this year.

It is customary for Ripple to send back approximately 800 million or 900 million XRP to escrow, with the remaining XRP used used to cover operating expenses, distribution to customers and some other financial firms, and to ensure adequate XRP liquidity in cryptocurrency exchanges. Overall, the billion XRP distributed is worth a stunning $835,140,718 in fiat currency.

Even though this practise of freeing coins from escrow began just four years back, several members of the XRP community were concerned that it would cause the XRP price to fall. A campaign on Change.org was even established to urge Ripple to cease the practice. Nevertheless, as time lapsed, it became evident that the releases had no effect on the price in any way whatsoever.

Two XRP transactions, each involving twenty million coins, were also identified. Initially, using an additional wallet, Ripple sent a payment of $0.01 to Coins.ph – the Philippines based ODL platform. When transferring XRP to external wallets, this is the wallet often used by the company. Twenty million XRP were transferred from the US-based crypto exchange Bittrex to Bitstamp trading platform as part of the second transfer. Bitstamp is Ripple’s official decentralised ledger (ODL) operator in Europe.

Besides that, according to the data given by the XRP analytics portal Bithomp, on December 31 a big chunk of 177,149,680 XRP (valued $149,186,270) was transmitted by Bitstamp among its wallets, indicating a significant increase in activity. According to current market conditions, XRP, the eighth-ranked cryptocurrency, is battling to return over the $1 mark, but it has so far maintained a price in the $0.080s. As of the time of writing this report, Ripple was trading at $0.8434, representing a 0.40 percent decline in the previous 24 hours.