Billions in XRP tokens and thousands of bitcoin were sent to exchanges

Billions in XRP tokens and thousands of bitcoin were sent to exchanges shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump revealed plans to include the assets

The U.S. president's proposal to add crypto assets to the strategic reserve was leaked on Monday by the White House. Shortly after the news broke, billions of XRP tokens and thousands of bitcoin were reportedly sent to exchanges.

The news comes as no surprise, given that the U.S. has been lagging behind China in the adoption of cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, China created its own central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital yuan, which is already widely used in the country.

Trump's administration has also been considering launching a U.S. CBDC, but there has been no progress on that front yet.

The rapid price reversals of both XRP and bitcoin after a recent surge may have been partly due to the large token movements.

On Tuesday, on-chain analysis firm CryptoQuant said that hourly inflows reached up to 193 million XRP after Trump’s message with most of the flows coming from whales (or influential holders of any asset) executing transactions of 1 million or more XRP.

On the other hand, the hourly amount of bitcoin BTCUSD flowing into exchanges increased from 500-1,000 to a high of 6,739 BTC a day after the announcement. Meanwhile, ETH inflows into exchanges spiked to almost 300,000 in an hour.

Inflows to exchanges from funds and traders usually imply an intention to sell, as large token holdings are usually stored in cold (or offline) wallets

Meanwhile, CryptoQuant analysts noted that the rise and sudden fall of cryptocurrencies on Monday and Tuesday indicated that real spot demand continued in contraction territory.

“Bitcoin apparent demand growth has continued to decline after a period of acceleration in November–December 2024 spurred by the U.S. election results and is now in contraction territory for the first time since September 2024,” analysts said. “Unless Bitcoin demand starts to increase again, sustaining a rally in crypto prices will remain challenging.”

Apparent demand is an on-chain metric used to gauge the balance between Bitcoin’s production (newly minted coins through mining) and changes in its inventory (coins that have been inactive for over a year). Retail accumulation has been down since early November, as CoinDesk previously reported.