Like several past transactions, Ripple just moved $302 million worth of XRP from one of its several escrow accounts to an unknown destination. The transaction had with it the message “Crawl… Walk… Run… ;)”. It is however said that the company has locked $80 million worth of the total transfer.
Just last year, $535 million worth of XRP was sold by XRP, many of its buyers being institutions and exchanges. This series of XRP sales are now suspected to be an attempt at pumping XRP price and dumping when the price goes really high. This is possible because Ripple retains about 60% of the total XRP supply from which it sells the bits noticed by whale watchers.
There have also been several stories surrounding the XRP price and one of the people at the forefront of stories has been the CEO of Messari, Ryan Selkis. According to him, Ripple has been exaggerating XRP market cap. He has published several reports one of which claims billions of XRP are being added to the supply out of thin air and the company does not provide reliable market information through its XRP data API.
A recent Twitter poll aimed at knowing public opinion on which cryptocurrency will see the highest gains in 2019 among Monero (XMR), Holo (HOT), Tron (TRX) and Ripple (XRP) showed 79% of the 1,833 respondents think XRP will see the highest gains, a result that has been questioned by a ZyCrypto reader who commented thus:
“This is great, but the amount of nonsense pump and dump news that comes out about XRP suggests to me that a marketing team are trying to talk this up. No other coin constantly says their Coin will jump as much as XRP. And nothing ever happens.”
The fact that Ripple stills hold over 60% of its token XRP is another valid reason why many say the project is centralized. That places in the management’s hands the power to manipulate instead of allowing the value of the asset to be determined by natural market trends. At this time, it has become questionable if all the progress Ripple is making such as XRP claiming the second spot was actually not as a result of manipulation.
