Another big chunk of XRP just showed up on Coinbase, and the way it landed looks like part of a story that has been playing out all summer. As it became usual, Whale Alert reported up to 16.59 million XRP — worth a little more than $50 million — moving from an unknown address straight into the major U.S. exchange.
On its own, a transfer like that could be explained away as a whale shifting funds, but the number lines up too cleanly with earlier moves to ignore.
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Back in June, XRP researchers mapped out a set of 52 cold wallets tied to Coinbase. Ten of them each held about 26.8 million XRP, while the other 42 sat at around 16.8 million, giving the whole cluster close to a billion tokens combined.
At that point, it was one of the clearest pictures available of how the exchange stored its XRP. Fast forward two months, and only 23 wallets still fit the same mold, and the total visible balance has fallen to about 379.5 million — more than 60% lower than before.
Where does Coinbase XRP leak go?
That missing balance has not shown up elsewhere in obvious fashion, which leaves open the question of whether it has been shuffled to fresh wallets, passed to custodians or withdrawn by large clients.
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In the meantime, the chart of XRP has not looked any less eventful, with the price slipping back under $3 after reclaiming higher ground briefly on the weekend.
The timing does not prove anything, but with transfers repeating in near-identical sizes, while the visible stash keeps shrinking, the sense builds that Coinbase’s XRP playbook still has pages nobody outside can read.
