Here’s How Much XRP Sold on Exchanges from Ripple Chairman Hack

XRP net sales on exchanges recently slipped close to the 100 million XRP mark, with over $73 million in withdrawn funds following the hack affecting the Ripple chairman.

Market analytics resource Kaiko highlighted part of this data in a recent post on X. The platform shared a chart detailing XRP’s cumulative volume delta (CVD). Notably, this metric reveals the cumulative number of XRP market participants who have bought and sold on exchanges over a period of time.

XRP Net Sale Nears 100M

Data from the chart indicates that XRP saw a positive CVD on Jan. 30, as users bought more XRP than they sold on major exchanges, with over 20 million net purchases on Binance. Despite the buying pressure, XRP recorded a 4.58% drop that day due to the broader market turbulence.

📌Ripple’s #XRP Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) – a measure of net buying and selling – showed a net sell off of nearly 100mn XRP, primarily on Binance and OKX after last week’s hack of Ripple’s co-founder. pic.twitter.com/xxk9uvG6lc

— Kaiko (@KaikoData) February 5, 2024

Following the increased purchases, XRP’s CVD drastically collapsed. Exchanges Binance and OKX contributed most to this drop, as customers on these platforms continued to sell off their XRP holdings. The drop extended to Jan. 31 but remained fairly stable until ZachXBT spotlighted the hack.

Recall that the on-chain sleuth was the first to call attention to the exploit affecting Ripple’s co-founder and executive chairman Chris Larsen. ZachXBT had noted that the affected wallet belonged to Ripple due to a mistag from XRPL explorers XRPScan and Bithomp.

Larsen confirmed the hack, but stressed that the exploit affected his personal wallet, as previously reported by The Crypto Basic. The ancestry of the address corroborated Larsen’s claim. 

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ZachXBT revealed that the assets were moved to multiple centralized exchanges, including Binance, HTX, OKX, MEXC, Kraken and Gate.io. In a subsequent disclosure, the Ripple chairman noted that the exploiters had converted most of the funds to other crypto assets.

These selloffs likely contributed to the drastic drop in XRP’s CVD on these exchanges in addition to panic selling from other investors. Kaiko’s data shows that the CVD continued to drop following ZachXBT’s post on the hacking incident, collapsing close to the 100 million XRP mark on Feb. 1.

Massive BTC Withdrawals

Despite a mild recovery on Feb. 2, the metric remained below the average mark, with Binance and OKX seeing the largest sales during this period. Recall that Binance managed to freeze $4.2 million worth of XRP connected to the hack, as disclosed by CEO Richard Teng. 

However, it appears the hackers successfully sold most of the stolen XRP tokens. In a recent disclosure, ZachXBT called attention to massive Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals from these exchanges, mostly from HTX, Gate.io and Kraken. These withdrawals amounted to $73.3 million worth of BTC. 

Due to the amounts and volume of XRP deposits made to centralized exchanges from the addresses above you can trace $73.3M+ of BTC withdrawals from HTX, Gate, and Kraken which likely came from the Chris Larsen hack (Ripple Co-Founder) using timing analysis.

Some of the Kraken…

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) February 5, 2024

HTX accounted for $63.7 million, Gate.io saw $6.69 million, while Kraken recorded $2.9 million. The blockchain sleuth stressed that these assets were likely part of the funds converted from XRP in the Larsen hack. According to him, some of the funds from Kraken went to BTC mixing service Jambler.