On Sunday, January 14, Whale Alerts, a platform that tracks and reports large transactions on various blockchains, posted an intriguing transaction carried out on the XRP Ledger. However, unlike its usual reports, this particular one would spark a lot of discussion as it showed that 50% of the total circulating XRP supply were being sent to the Bitfinex crypto exchange – a move that could be detrimental for the crypto’s price.
Whale Alerts Reports 50% Of XRP Supply Sent To Centralized Exchange
The Whale Alert report caught the attention of the crypto community on the X (formerly Twitter) platform after it showed that a total of 25,601,477,777 XRP tokens were being moved to the Bitfinex crypto exchange. The tokens were valued at over $14.85 billion at the time of the transaction. This represented approximately 50% of the total circulating XRP supply and the sheer size of it quickly drew out comments from various enthusiast.
Community members were quick to point out that the whale tracker had made an error in reporting this particular transaction. Apparently, the Whale Alert code had read the transaction wrong and had inaccurately represented the amount of tokens that were being sent.
This cannot be real.
The circulating supply of $XRP is roughly 54b.
This is almost half of that. From one wallet. In one transaction. https://t.co/Y8D2ERDKTA
— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) January 14, 2024
Some users pointed out that the transaction was not actually carrying 25.6 billion XRP tokens to Bitfinex. In reality, it was only a partial payment transaction which was sending only a few cents worth of tokens to the exchange.
The post has since been deleted and the tracker has issued an explanation for what happened with reporting this transaction. “There was an issue with properly reading the #Ripple node response, resulting in a few wrong posts. We fixed the issue,” Whale Alert said on X.
Implications Of Such A Large Transaction
If the transaction reported by Whale Alert had turned out to be authentic, it would have had significant implications for the XRP price and none of them good. For one, sending tokens to centralized exchanges such as Bitfinex often means that the holder is looking to sell. In such a case, it would be putting selling pressure on the altcoin price, causing the price to drop.
Now, if 25.6 billion tokens are sent to a centralized exchange to being sold, such a sale would completely tank the price of XRP. In this case, the price of the token would drop to as low as $0.1 as sell pressure overwhelmed demand.
Luckily, it seems the transaction was as a result of a failed attempt to hack the Bitfinex exchange. According to Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether, hackers had tried to exploit the exchange using the “Partial Payments Exploit” attack. However, the “Attack failed since Bitfinex properly handles ‘delivered_amount’ data field” and the attackers were unsuccessful.
Someone attempted to attack @bitfinex via “Partial Payments Exploit”. Attack failed since Bitfinex properly handles ‘delivered_amount’ data field.https://t.co/EiGw9UQmmq
(updated with better gif) https://t.co/8I7vlO05ou pic.twitter.com/DxOnJLLkhU
— Paolo Ardoino
(@paoloardoino) January 14, 2024