According to crypto whale tracking service Whale Alert, prominent blockchain company Ripple has released another 1 billion XRP coins from its escrow account.

Ripple Labs, a famous fintech company, has unlocked another 1 billion XRP from its escrow account. The development was shared today by the leading crypto whale tracking service, Whale Alert.

1B XRP Unlocked

According to Whale Alert, the 1 billion XRP were unlocked in three different transactions on October 1 at exactly 00:00 (UTC). For the first transaction, a total of 500 million XRP worth $299.9M XRP were unlocked from the escrow account.

🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 500,000,000 #XRP (299,906,071 USD) unlocked from escrow at #Ripplehttps://t.co/aBFIs4q7Ef

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) November 1, 2023

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This was followed by another 400M XRP release valued at around $239.92 million.

🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 🔓 400,000,000 #XRP (239,924,857 USD) unlocked from escrow at #Ripplehttps://t.co/sBasI0iMrd

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) November 1, 2023

The final transaction saw a total of 100 million XRP, worth $59.98 million, unlocked from the escrow account.

🔓 🔓 🔓 100,000,000 #XRP (59,981,214 USD) unlocked from escrow at #Ripplehttps://t.co/FqIC4wfHSu

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) November 1, 2023

Ripple Moves 50M XRP

Notably, the transactions follow an earlier movement of 50M XRP transferred from one of Ripple’s accounts to an unknown address.

🚨 🚨 50,000,000 #XRP (29,870,608 USD) transferred from #Ripple to unknown wallethttps://t.co/iENd3mRrtp

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 31, 2023

Per Whale Alert data, the transaction occurred yesterday at 23:26 (UTC). Following the transaction, the Ripple address now holds 166.34M XRP, while the recipient address currently has a balance of 54.72M XRP.

Ripple Monthly Token Unlock Program

The 1B XRP unlocked from escrow is part of a routine token unlock program Ripple performs on the first day of each month. The leading blockchain company introduced the initiative in December 2017 as part of efforts to provide stability in the XRP markets.

At the time, Ripple locked 55 billion XRP in an escrow system programmed on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). Ripple programmed the system to release at least 1B XRP coins monthly over a period of 55 months.

To further protect the price of XRP from high volatility, Ripple took a more conservative approach by locking a huge chunk of the 1B XRP it releases monthly. In most cases, the company usually returns up to 800M XRP from the 1B coins released monthly.

At the time of writing, Ripple has yet to relock any portion of the recently released 1B XRP.

XRP Q3 Market Report

In other news, Ripple has released its market report for Q3 2023. According to the report, XRP recorded massive volatility on July 13, when a federal court declared the coin as non-security. XRP’s volatility in Q3 2023 ended at 40%, marking a historical 90-day low.

Ripple mentioned that Binance was the most significant player in the XRP market in Q3 2023. The exchange accounted for 60% of the total XRP trading volumes on exchanges in the previous quarter.

XRP Trading Volume on XRPL DEX Soars 3X

Furthermore, XRP trading volume on the XRPL decentralized exchange spiked 3x in Q3 2023. The DEX’s trading volume in Q3 reached a whopping $218,610,501 ($218.61 million) compared to the $51,671,864 ($51.67 million) recorded in the previous quarter. In addition, the number of XRP new addresses surged 13.91% in Q3 to 157,936.

How Much XRP Ripple Holds in Escrow

According to Ripple’s Q3 report, a total of 41,300,000,005 (41.3 billion) XRP were still locked in Ripple’s escrow account as of September 30.

On October 1, the blockchain company unlocked 1B XRP tokens from the escrow account and relocked another 800M coins. Consequently, Ripple now has approximately 40.1B XRP locked in escrow.

It remains to be seen whether some amounts of the recently released XRP coins will be put back in escrow.