A wallet belonging to Ripple Chairman Chris Larsen moves 50 million XRP to a new unidentified address.
It is interesting to note that this latest transaction was the wallet us first significant outbound transfer since it was established. Interestingly, this wallet was established during the XRPL’s early stages and funded in February 2013 with a massive 500 million XRP, which was a portion of the XRP allocations given to the Ripple Chairman.
Since then, the wallet has only successfully transferred one XRP in December 2017 out of all of the tokens. But as of last night, the whale tracking resource Whale Alert indexed the most recent significant outflow from the address.
🚨 🚨 50,000,000 #XRP (29,120,312 USD) transferred from Chris Larsen to unknown wallet https://t.co/D9iopMqePM
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 16, 2024
Details of the XRP Transaction
This transaction took place on September 16, at 23:17 UTC, and involved precisely 50 million XRP, which was valued at $29.12 million at the time, according to on-chain data. It is interesting to note that the assets were transferred to rao.gzS, an unidentified address made especially for this purpose.
Given the nature of the transaction and the fact that the tokens in this wallet had not changed since its creation, there was conjecture that another hack might have occurred. The Crypto Basic can attest, though, that this is unlikely.
Remember that in February, comparable fund transfers involved a different wallet belonging to Larsen. However, The Crypto Basic has confirmed that these transfers resulted from a hacking incident that took millions of XRP out of the wallet belonging to the Ripple Chairman. More than 212 million XRP was stolen by the hackers.
Internal Fund Movement
On-chain data, however, indicates that Larsen may have personally approved the most recent fund transfer. Interestingly, the recipient wallet rao…gzS was activated by the sending wallet in question.
At 23:11, the Larsen wallet moved the 50 million XRP to the address after activating it with 10 XRP. Further allaying worries about an exploit is the recipient address’s retention of the tokens at the time of reporting.
Now that the prospect of a hack has been eliminated, there are still a number of theories as to the motivation behind the transaction. A few supporters joked that the money might be utilized to help Kamala Harris’s campaign. However, this remains speculative.
For background, The Crypto Basic revealed two weeks ago that 88 corporate leaders had expressed support for Harris’s presidential bid, including the chairman of Ripple. After Uphold co-founder J.P. Theriot publicly endorsed Harris, Larsen became the second prominent crypto executive to publicly support Harris..