Ripple and its XRP are on the rise. The company Ripple has ambitions for the XRP Ledger ecosystem and its RippleNet network. Its CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, even envisions that they will capture up to 14% of the SWIFT network by 5 years. And it is not the statistics of on-chain activity, which we will see here, that will say otherwise. Indeed, exchanges are exploding on the XRP blockchain, and there have never been as many whales (large investors).
Active addresses exploded by 8 on the Ripple network last week
Since the launch of the XRP Ledger by Ripple in June 2012, Brad Garlinghouse's company has had its ups and especially downs, with its legal troubles with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) of the United States, which began in December 2020 and are not yet fully resolved today (even though it should now just be a formality).
But as recently revealed by analysts from Santiment on X, the XRP ecosystem is currently quite high, at least on-chain. Indeed, the 'XRP Ledger shows significant signs of growth'. Notably, the number of active XRP addresses has exploded over the past week.
Indeed, there are around 295,000 addresses per day that have had at least one interaction. By comparison, its 'normal daily average over the last three months was around 35,000 to 40,000' active addresses, according to analysts from Santiment.
In nearly 13 years of existence, there have never been as many whales on the XRP Ledger as there are today
If there is a general increase in activity, it seems that the largest investors are fully part of it. Indeed, the Ripple network has just broken its historical record in terms of millionaires in XRP (or at least, wallets holding at least 1 million XRP).
According to analysts from Santiment (see chart below), there are now 2,708 wallets of 'whales' and 'sharks' holding 1 million or more XRP. At the current price of the digital token at the time of writing (2.20 dollars), this represents a minimum of 2.2 million dollars per wallet.
And activity on the XRP Ledger is not expected to slow down, quite the opposite, with Ripple's recent announcement of an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible sidechain. This will enable compatibility with smart contracts developed for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and should further boost activity in the XRP ecosystem.