The interesting thing about crypto is that the underlying technology makes it possible to analyze the coins in great detail. We can see on the blockchains of virtually all projects how the industry’s largest investors are behaving. In this case we do that for Ripple’s XRP coin, which runs on the XRP Ledger. New data from the XRPL shows that the number whales has increased significantly in the past 30 days.
Whales buy XRP
In total, about 50 whales have been added to Ripple’s network in the past month. We speak of an XRP whale when someone owns between 10 million and 100 million XRP. This group of large investors bought about 420 million XRP tokens in the past 30 days, which are worth about $155.4 million in total. Analyst Ali Martinez reports this based on Santiment data:
Over the past month, ~50 whales holding 10 million to 100 million $XRP have joined the #Ripple network.
These large investors have purchased around 420 million #XRPworth $155.4 million, shows data from @santimentfeed. pic.twitter.com/6L3gBwbdiW
— Ali (@ali_charts) March 19, 2023
In that respect, it seems like the big boys (and girls) have confidence in the XRP price in the short term. The end of the lawsuit between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple appears to be in sight. These whales seem to be betting on the outcome of the lawsuit.
Criticism from the community
Ripple is a project that has a true love-hate relationship with the rest of the crypto community. It really seems like a project for which there are only two tastes: you love it or you hate it. Even before the lawsuit, the project faced a lot of criticism, mainly regarding the centralization of XRP.
The fact that Ripple wants to collaborate with the banking industry is also not to everyone’s taste. Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto as a replacement for the traditional financial system. While Bitcoin was born out of a kind of aversion to the traditional financial system, Ripple tries to strengthen that system. In that sense, Ripple often arouses a certain aversion among the real bitcoin purists.