Whale watchers in the crypto space are still trying to understand the events of the last few hours after a massive whale activity.
XRP Whale
According to a tweet sent out by Whale Alert, a huge amount of XRP has been shipped out of Bittrex and headed to Upbit. Bittrex and Upbit are both crypto exchanges. For this movement, Whale Alert tracked about 50 separate transactions associated with the same wallet. Each of these transactions involved the movement of around 10 million XRP coins, with the total value of all the XRP moved amounting to a cool $159,536,070.
On the same twitter thread posted by Whale Alert, Bittrex Exchange dropped a comment notifying its customers of the platform’s system upgrade scheduled for later today.
Stellar (XLM) Whale
At around the same time, the XRP whale was spotted, another Stellar whale swung into action. The movement involved 22 transactions, with each transferring about 10 million XLM. Interestingly, this happened on Bittrex, the same exchange from where the XRP transactions originated. The total value of the XLM moved adds up to about $867,000. However, this movement seemed to have been headed to a cold wallet as opposed to the XRP that was transferred from Bittrex to Upbit.
Could It Be Bittrex?
Within a few hours, a total of 727 million coins consisting of XRP and XLM were moved. Given that the two cryptos were moved from the same exchange, some people argue that there’s a possibility that the transactions could have been initiated by Bittrex itself. In a separate tweet, Bittrex announced that it will be conducting a system update later in the day.
However, it’s still not clear if the planned upgrade has anything to do with the whale activity. The upgrade is scheduled to commence at exactly 21:00 UTC. During this period, there will be no access to online wallets and trading markets. In a notice posted by Bittrex on Monday, the company explained that the upgrade is meant to make the exchange more scalable and efficient.
Bitcoin Bulls
This whale activity occurs at a time when various crypto analysts are expressing a lot of optimism about the short term future of the top crypto, Bitcoin. However, there seems to be a lot less enthusiasm for XRP and Ethereum. That said, whether or not the whale activity has something to do with this sentiment is yet to unravel.
