XRP Jumps 20% After Mysterious Binance Transfers as Crypto Rally Expands to Laggards

Ripple (XRP), the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger payment network developed by Ripple Labs, advanced over 20% Monday, snapping its downtrend versus bitcoin (BTC) as the crypto rally broadened.

CoinDesk data shows that XRP sharply jumped to $0.74 in a little more than an hour Monday afternoon UTC time, notching its highest price since a very short-lived spike last November amid speculation about a potential BlackRock-managed XRP ETF. Today's 20% gain made XRP the best-performing asset in the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which was higher by 5%.

While bitcoin had already broken record highs and some corners of the crypto space such as meme coins and artificial-intelligence (AI) tokens experienced exorbitant gains, XRP had so far been notably absent from the action. When measured against bitcoin, XRP prior to today's move had slid to a 3-year low, TradingView data shows. Even with this afternoon's big jump, XRP is now only up 17% year-to-date, substantially underperforming BTC's 64% advance and the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index 54% gain.

XRP's rally could be a sign of traders turning their attention and rotating some of their capital to tokens that haven't moved yet as the rally on digital asset markets broadens.

Other older cryptocurrencies such as litecoin (LTC) and dash (DASH), which too had been laggards over the past months, also surged over the past 24 hours, gaining 18% and 9%, respectively. Avalanche's AVAX, Polkadot's DOT and Cardano's ADA, advanced 8-13% during the day.

While there wasn't any apparent catalyst immediately before XRP's price action, large token movements from crypto exchange Binance sparked speculations among crypto observers.

Blockchain data tracker Whale Alert noted a transfer of 300 million XRP – worth some $187 million at the time – leaving Binance's address and deposited into an unknown wallet.

The transfer was then followed by a series of similar outbound transactions – worth 18-19 million XRP each – from Binance and deposited to different addresses.

The transactions could perhaps indicate whales – large crypto investors – accumulating XRP before the move up, but may also be due to the exchange shifting coins to new addresses as part of an internal wallet maintenance.