Following reports by ZachXBT on X that 213 million $XRP tokens valued at $112.5 million were stolen and laundered through exchanges like MEXC, Binance, Kraken, and OKX, the price of $XRP experienced a significant drop of more than 5%, now trading below the $0.5 mark.
Chris Larsen, co-founder of Ripple, confirmed the theft, clarifying that the tokens were taken from his personal accounts rather than Ripple’s.
Larsen assured that they swiftly detected the issue and informed exchanges to freeze the affected addresses, with law enforcement already involved.
$XRP Price Action Following The News
After Wednesday’s decline, XRP Ledger fell below the $0.50 market value for the first time since October 19th.
However, despite the setback, yesterday recorded the highest number of $XRP $1M+ whale transactions on the network (217) since prices surged after a judge’s ruling that Ripple did not violate securities laws on July 13th and 14th.
Moreover, there appears to be no panic among XRP whales. Wallets holding at least 10M $XRP now account for 67.2% of the available supply, the highest since December 31, 2022.
These signals suggest that the #6 market cap asset could be primed for a rebound, provided Bitcoin stabilizes throughout the week.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any Metaverse crypto coins.