The gap between XRP whale and retail activity across all exchanges has narrowed significantly amid the ongoing crypto market volatility that has caused XRP to revisit its lowest price level in over a month.
Following this event, XRP whale dominance across centralized exchanges has declined significantly over the last day, per recent data from crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant.
XRP whale-retail spread loses 17.3 percentage points
It is important to note that the whale vs. retail spread helps to reflect the behavior of large and small traders at a specific time, as it measures the relative difference between whale and retail activity in XRP exchange outflows.
Thus, the data shows that the whale-retail spread for XRP on all existing centralized exchanges has fallen from 64% on September 30 to 46.7% on October 8.
While this marks a decline of 17.3 percentage points, or about 27%, in just eight days, it means that whale activity across the exchanges has become significantly weak when compared to that of retail participants over the stated period.
Are whales selling?
While the metric suggests that large XRP holders are becoming dormant compared to retail traders, this does not mean that whales are selling. It simply means that they are barely participating in trading activities at this time.
Apparently, the dormancy of whales has become more noticeable on the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, as the data further shows that Binance also recorded a notable decline during the same period.
Over the last eight days, the whale-retail spread on Binance has dropped from 68% to 54.9%, marking a 13.1 percentage-point decline, or a drop of 19.3% on the exchange alone.
Arman Shirinyan
Dan Burgin
