XRP Jumps 20% After Mysterious Binance Transfers as Crypto Rally Expands to Laggards
On Monday, the cryptocurrency known as Ripple (XRP), which is unique to the payment network known as the XRP Ledger and created by Ripple Labs, experienced a significant increase of over 20%. This growth brought an end to XRP's decline compared to bitcoin (BTC) as the broader market for cryptocurrencies continued to rise.
According to CoinDesk's information, the price of XRP rose rapidly to $0.74 in just over an hour on Monday afternoon (UTC). This is the highest price it has reached since a brief spike in November last year, which happened because people were guessing that BlackRock might manage a XRP ETF. This time, XRP increased by 20%, making it the top performer among the assets listed in the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which increased by 5% overall.
Bitcoin has been hitting new peak prices, and some parts of the cryptocurrency world, like meme coins and AI tokens, have been making big gains. However, XRP has been left out of this success until now. According to TradingView data, XRP had fallen to a low point over the last 3 years compared to bitcoin, but this changed significantly today. Even with this jump in price, XRP's year-to-date increase is only at 17%, which is much lower than BTC's 64% rise and the CoinDesk 20 Index's 54% gain.
The value of XRP compared to BTC has dropped to its lowest point since March 2021, according to TradingView.
The surge in XRP's value may indicate that traders are shifting their focus and investing some of their funds in tokens that haven't seen any growth yet, as the surge in the overall digital asset markets widens.
Recently, some well-known digital currencies that have been around for a while, like litecoin and dash, experienced an improvement in their value after a notable drop. In the past 24 hours, litecoin and dash saw an increase of 18% and 9% respectively. Additionally, other cryptocurrencies such as Avalanche's AVAX, Polkadot's DOT, and Cardano's ADA also climbed up in price by 8-13% during the day.
Although there wasn't any noticeable trigger just before XRP's price shift, significant transfers of tokens from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance raised suspicions among cryptocurrency experts.
The data tracker known as Whale Alert has reported that 300 million XRP, equivalent to a value of approximately $187 million, has been transferred from Binance's address and placed into an unfamiliar wallet.
After the transfer, there were several outbound transactions that were alike - these transactions were valued at around 18-19 million XRP - made by Binance and sent to various addresses.
It's possible that the transfers suggest significant players in the crypto industry, known as whales, gathering XRP in preparation for a surge. However, these movements may also be the result of the exchange transferring coins to different destinations as part of managing their internal wallets.
