Uphold Transfers 500 Million XRP to Five Newly Created Wallets

On September 17, the multi‑asset platform Uphold moved a total of 500 million XRP – roughly $649 million at the time – into five brand‑new XRP Ledger addresses. Each address received exactly 100 million XRP, and all five were activated by the same Uphold wallet earlier that day.

Details of the transfers

The on‑chain tracker labeled the sender as Uphold (12). Within a 16‑minute window the wallet sent five identical payments of 100,000,000 XRP each. Prior to the large deposits, Uphold (12) seeded each new address with a small “reserve” amount: 60 XRP, 70 XRP, 80 XRP, 90 XRP and 100 XRP respectively. An address on the XRP Ledger only becomes active after it receives enough XRP to cover its reserve, making the parent account (Uphold 12) the durable fingerprint for all five wallets.

Activity after the deposits

As of 05:30 UTC on September 18, none of the five recipient wallets had sent any further payments. The only additional traffic was a 0.00001 XRP ping from a separate address that was also sending dust‑spam to over a hundred other wallets.

Context and prior activity

This is the second large‑scale XRP movement by Uphold within a four‑day span. On September 14, a different Uphold wallet (Uphold 4) transferred 145.6 million XRP to an address it had activated earlier in May. After that transfer, Uphold 12’s balance was estimated at about 1.47 billion XRP; following the September 17 payouts its balance fell to roughly 962.9 million XRP.

Possible explanations

The pattern – creating fresh addresses, seeding them with minimal XRP, then moving large sums – could indicate an internal cold‑storage split or the exit of a large client. The ledger data alone cannot confirm which scenario applies.

Market conditions

During the transfers XRP traded between $1.29 and $1.32, staying near $1.30. Bitcoin was priced around $76,600. The moves did not interact with any order book activity, and they occurred shortly after the Senate’s close vote on the CLARITY Act and a Federal Reserve rate hike.