XRP Whale Makes $68.7 Million Coinbase Deposit—Cashing In On Price Surge?

On-chain data shows an XRP whale has made a large inflow into the Coinbase exchange, a sign that could be bearish for the asset’s price.

An XRP Whale Has Made A Huge Transaction During The Past Day

According to data from the cryptocurrency transaction tracker service Whale Alert, a large movement has taken place on the XRP network during the last 24 hours.

The move in question involved the transfer of 29,532,534 tokens of the cryptocurrency, worth more than $68.7 million at the time that the move went through on the blockchain. Given the large scale involved in the transaction, it’s likely that a whale entity was responsible for it.

Whales are the big-money investors of the sector, who can carry some degree of influence in the market. As such, their movements can be worth keeping an eye on.

Most of their transactions, though, don’t contain anything interesting, as cryptocurrencies are by nature anonymous. Sometimes, however, an address already identified can be involved in the move. In these cases, there can be space to speculate on the intent behind the move.

The current XRP whale transfer is like this as well. Here are the addresses involved in the transaction:

As is visible above, the sending address for this XRP transaction was an unknown wallet, meaning it was unattached to any known centralized platform. In other words, it was likely an investor’s personal wallet.

The receiving address, on the other hand, was connected to a known entity: the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Thus, it would seem that with this move, the whale has transferred coins from their self-custodial address to an exchange.

Moves of this type are called exchange inflows. Generally, holders send their coins into the custody of these central entities when they want to make use of one of the services that they provide, which can include selling. As such, exchange inflows can sometimes prove to be bearish for the asset’s price.

It’s hard to say whether the whale wanted to sell with the move, but considering that it has come after XRP has enjoyed bullish momentum over the past week, it’s possible that profit-taking may indeed be a likely motive.

In some more bullish news, XRP may be breaking out of an inverse head-and-shoulders pattern, as analyst Ali Martinez has pointed out in an X post.

An inverse head-and-shoulders is a pattern that, as its name already suggests, is an inverted version of the usual head-and-shoulders. From the chart, it’s apparent that after forming the right shoulder, XRP has seemingly found a surge above the neckline, which can be a sign of a bullish breakout.

XRP Price

XRP briefly went as high as $2.36 during the past day, but it appears the coin has suffered a pullback since then as it’s now back at $2.27.