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- Grapedrop, an XRPL validator, is speaking out, warning that something suspicious might be going on with XRP’s price.
- He traced the massive transfers with a Python tool he built, linking them to Bitget and several other platforms.
Just when the XRP community thought the sky was clear, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit was off their back, and they stumbled upon another brick wall. However, it’s not a lawsuit; it’s market manipulation allegations from Grapedrop, an XRPL validator and a cryptocurrency enthusiast.
He begins his X thread by saying,
If anyone has been following me, you probably know I started running an XRPL Validator since July 12, 2025, and what I’m seeing is…shocking. This isn’t conspiracy talk, I have live transaction data that might prove how the XRP price is being manipulated.
Grapedrop points out that while there are about 1,000 XRPL nodes worldwide, only 150–170 are active validators on the mainnet, and this is one of them. Using a Python script to flag transactions over 10,000 XRP, he discovered massive transfers happening every few minutes, such as 49,900 XRP, 67,655 XRP, and even 146,757 XRP.
This activity occurs thousands of times a day, with many transactions linked to exchange wallets like Bitget via XRPSCAN, though not exclusively.
The concern, he says, is that crypto prices often rely on volume-weighted averages, meaning if the same player or group repeatedly shifts large amounts of XRP between exchanges, a practice known as wash trading, it can artificially inflate trading volume, skew price indexes, and distort market capitalization.
This creates the illusion of demand, which can trigger trading bots, hype up market sentiment, and even move prices in thinner order books. While wash trading is banned in traditional finance, in the crypto world, enforcement gaps leave plenty of room for such manipulation.
Even though Grapedrop’s findings look suspicious and fit a known pattern of market manipulation, they don’t prove it beyond doubt. There could be other explanations for those large transfers, like legitimate liquidity management between exchanges, OTC (over-the-counter) settlements, or internal wallet reorganizations.
Without knowing the intent of the people or entities behind the transactions, or having direct evidence that these transfers were made to distort price, the claim remains a theory rather than a confirmed fact.
Ripple’s ICO Debate
On top of this, some critics, like Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long, have argued that Ripple’s early XRP distribution resembled an ICO, claiming it “extracted money up front” and couldn’t be trusted.
However, XRPL validator Vet countered that Ripple never conducted an ICO, XRP had no initial value when the ledger launched, with all 100 billion tokens created in the genesis account.
Unlike Ethereum’s official 2014 ICO, XRP was never sold through a public offering but was instead gradually distributed over time.
Despite all the chatter and allegations, XRP’s price is still nowhere near its 2021 all-time high of $3.84, or the bold predictions calling for $5 or even $10.
That said, trading activity has ticked up, with volume rising 3% in the past 24 hours to $9.36 billion. XRP’s market cap now sits at $195 billion, keeping it firmly in third place among the largest cryptocurrencies.
