Recent market dynamics have resulted in XRP prices have been rising in the past psychological level of $1 for the first time since 2021. This was a significant milestone for the price of XRP, which has remained below $0.6 for most of the last three years.

This growth, driven by key market dynamics and specific holder activity, highlights the role of strategic accumulation by gigantic stakeholders. In particular, the chain data shows an intriguing trend among whalessharks and retail wallets.

XRP price break to $1.26: surge in whales and sharks

The price of XRP on Binance rose to $1.26, reaching a level not seen since November 11, 2021. This three-year high comes amid a broader rally in the cryptocurrency market, but XRP’s price escalate is tied to strategic moves by its key stakeholders and expected change in the leadership of the US SEC.

According to Santiment’s on-chain analytics platform, gigantic XRP holders, particularly wallets holding between 1 million and 100 million tokens, played a key role in this breakout. It is worth noting that this cohort of holders is made up of the shark and whale categories. That is, semi-large and gigantic XRP holders.

Just last week, Whale and Shark XRP wallets accumulated a total of 453.3 million XRP tokens, bringing their total holdings to approximately 18% of the total XRP supply. At the current average price of XRP, this accumulation is worth approximately $526.3 million. The accumulation of whale and shark wallets is not a coincidence. As Santiment noted, history shows that large-scale acquisitions by market participants usually signal bullish sentiment and often precede sustained price increases.

Interestingly, while whales and sharks are accumulating XRP, retail traders are dumping their holdings. Santiment reported that over the past week, wallets holding less than 1 million XRP sold a total of 75.7 million tokens worth approximately $87.9 million. However, most of these landings were taken over by shark and whale portfolios to essentially counteract any negative impacts of landfills.

Image from X: Santiment

What’s next for XRP?

The huge escalate in XRP prices caused the cryptocurrency to displace Dogecoin from the market capitalization rankings and regain its position as the sixth largest asset. The price of XRP has increased by approximately 11% in the last 24 hours, while the price of Dogecoin has decreased by approximately 7%.

At the time of writing, XRP has recovered slightly from that three-year high of $1.26 and is currently trading at $1.06. Nevertheless, there is still bullish sentiment around XRP, especially if sharks and whales are able to stay above the $1 level. This will in turn lead to simultaneous retail sales FUD that will fuel more growth.

According to cryptocurrency analyst Egraga Crypto, the next bullish move will be for XRP price to close above $1.10 on the current weekly candlestick.

Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView