Ripple Moves 35M XRP and the Mystery Wallet Forwards 6.5M Within Hours

A Look at the Transfer

The alert came from onchain sleuth Whale Alert during the early hours of Oct. 2 with 35,000,000 XRP (valued at $52,425,783) moving from Ripple to an “unknown wallet.”

The ledger backs up the headline as the transaction record shows the payment settling at 00:21 UTC from an account that the block explorer Xrpscan labels as Ripple (and has the ripple.com domain attached to it). The sending account still holds roughly 42.9 million XRP post the move.

The payment also carried a destination tag. On the XRP Ledger, a destination tag is a number used to route a payment to a specific customer or purpose inside a shared address. Exchanges and custodians use them all the time, so the tag hints at an intermediary rather than a private holder.

Following the 35 Million

The receiving wallet, opened in December 2024, did not sit on the coins, and its onchain history shows three outbound payments to a single address within roughly two and a half hours:

00:58 UTC: 1.5 million XRP 02:52 UTC: 2.5 million XRP 02:53 UTC: 2.5 million XRP

All three carried the same destination tag.

That leaves about 28.6 million XRP in the first wallet, and the downstream address holds roughly 6.5 million XRP, almost exactly what it just received. Neither wallet carries a public label, so who controls them remains an open question.

A Busy Week for One Ripple Wallet

The 35 million was not a one-off, as the same Ripple account sent 25 million XRP to a different address on Oct. 1, along with several smaller payments of 250,000 to roughly 3 million XRP on Sept. 30, all visible on Xrpscan.

The timing lines up with Ripple’s monthly schedule, given that Oct. 1 was the company’s tenth 1 billion XRP escrow release of the year. Ripple usually puts most of each release back into escrow, and after its Sept. 1 unlock, it re-locked 700 million XRP, leaving roughly 32 billion locked (so only 200 million to 300 million tokens a month typically reach the market).

What the ETF Numbers Reveal

US spot XRP ETFs took in a net $4.07 million on Oct. 1, with Franklin’s XRPZ adding $4.065 million, lifting its lifetime inflows to $505 million, while Canary’s XRPC lost $3.18 million. Total net assets across the funds came to $1.695 billion against $1.794 billion in cumulative inflows.

That gap fits the September trend, when XRP ETFs pulled in $121 million but their assets still shrank. Bitwise’s fund had led a stronger session on Sept. 25, taking $18.39 million of that day’s $22.65 million.

Lastly, it bears mentioning that XRP is trading near $1.52, up about 0.6% over 24 hours, at press time. Over the same time frame, bitcoin has gained about 2.1%, which makes XRP’s calm look more like indifference than fear.

Sentiment was already cool before the transfer, as Santiment’s crowd data had turned bearish, with a bullish-to-bearish ratio of 0.67. That said, the bigger XRP story this week may be Evernorth’s 473 million XRP treasury edging toward Nasdaq. Interesting few days ahead, to say the least!