This Korean XRP Exchange Data Has The Community Losing It

Crypto market researcher Dom (@traderview2) says he’s recognized what appears like a persistent, algorithmic XRP vendor on South Korea’s Upbit: one which, by his estimates, has offloaded roughly 3.3 billion XRP into the XRP/KRW order e book over the previous 10 months. If the evaluation holds, it reframes Upbit’s XRP circulation as a venue-specific phenomenon reasonably than a easy reflection of world risk-on/risk-off sentiment.

XRP/KRW Saw $5 Billion in Net Selling

Dom analyzed “82 million trades on Upbit XRP/KRW” and mapped their web imbalance over time. His headline conclusion: “A $5 billion one directional promoting pipeline operating 24/7 for nearly a yr.”

Dom mentioned the work started after an intense intraday stretch that pressured a better take a look at the tape. “It began with yesterday’s worth motion. -57M XRP in CVD over 17 hours. It regarded insane,” he wrote. “So I ran forensic queries – bot fingerprinting, iceberg detection, wash commerce checks. The promoting was actual. Algorithmic. 61% of trades fired inside 10ms. Single bot operating 17 hours straight with one 33 second pause.”

Instead of treating that -57 million XRP cumulative quantity delta as an outlier, Dom mentioned he zoomed out and located it matched a longer-running sample. “-57M isn’t an anomaly,” he wrote. “Upbit XRP/KRW has been web unfavorable each single month for 10 months,” itemizing a number of months with massive web promoting: “Apr: -165M,” “Jul: -197M,” “Oct: -382M,” and “Jan: -370M.” In complete, he put the determine at “3.3 BILLION XRP in web promoting. ~$5B.”

He additionally argued the circulation is unusually constant. “Only 1 week out of 46 was optimistic. One,” Dom wrote, including that there’s “no weekday/weekend distinction” and “no time of day the place shopping for outweighs promoting in combination.” That persistence is a part of why he framed it as one thing nearer to execution infrastructure than discretionary buying and selling. “This isn’t a dealer,” he wrote. “It’s infrastructure.”

A key a part of the thread is the cross-venue comparability. Dom mentioned Binance’s XRP/USDT market confirmed materially much less promote strain throughout the identical home windows—“2-5x much less promote strain on the identical coin,” he wrote, pointing to a June interval the place “Binance was web optimistic whereas Upbit bled -218M.”

He additionally flagged a weak relationship between the 2 venues’ hour-by-hour circulation, claiming “the hourly correlation between the 2 venues is just 0.37,” which might suggest Upbit’s web promoting is being pushed by native elements reasonably than merely mirroring international positioning.

XRP Traded Cheaper In Korea For Months

Dom’s pricing observations added one other layer. He mentioned that from April by way of September, Upbit XRP traded “3-6% BELOW Binance,” calling it a “reverse Kimchi discount.” In his view, that element issues as a result of it suggests the vendor was keen to just accept constantly worse execution than what was out there elsewhere.

“The sellers had been accepting 6% worse fills than out there on international markets, for a lot of months,” Dom wrote. “They don’t care concerning the worth. They want KRW, are mandated to make use of Upbit, and/or are Korean holders taking revenue…”

He then pointed to what he described as a structural break round Oct. 10. “Korean retail went insane. Premium flipped from -0.07% to +2.4% in a single day. Trades 5x’d to 832K,” Dom wrote, including that the premium “has solely briefly gone unfavorable since.” The vendor, in his telling, didn’t again off—if something, the tempo elevated. “And the sellers? They doubled their each day fee. From -6.3M/day to -11.2M/day.”

Dom tried to attach that habits to market regimes by “bucket[ing] daily by what XRP did on Binance globally,” reporting that Upbit circulation skews closely unfavorable on down days and particularly on crash days.

He summarized the dynamic as suggestions between a scientific vendor and retail habits: “On moon days, Korean retail turns into a NET BUYER. They’re accumulating,” he wrote. “On crash days, promote depth is 8x heavier. The systematic vendor + retail panic amplify one another. Korean retail buys each rip. The pipeline sells into all of it.”

To help the “machine versus retail” framing, Dom contrasted order-size fingerprints on each side of the tape. He claimed the promote aspect repeatedly used round-number clips—“10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 XRP”—with “57-60% of all trades hearth inside 10ms,” whereas the purchase aspect confirmed a big fraction of “tiny fractional sizes,” resembling “2.535, 3.679, 2.681 XRP,” which he argued is per KRW-denominated retail tickets like shopping for a hard and fast gained quantity of XRP. “One aspect appears like retail,” he wrote. “The different appears like a machine.”

The scale declare can be central to why the thread traveled. Dom mentioned “3.3 billion XRP” represents “5.4% of XRP’s complete circulating provide,” moved by way of “a single buying and selling pair, on a single trade, in 10 months.” He emphasised he’s working from trade-level datasets: “This evaluation used tick commerce knowledge I collected from Upbit and Binance,” he wrote, citing “82M Upbit trades + 444M Binance trades.”

Dom stopped in need of naming a selected entity behind the promoting, as a substitute posing a query he framed as the following investigative step: who can maintain “300-400M per 30 days for a yr straight,” seemingly “doesn’t care about 6% reductions,” and “wants KRW particularly or is in some walled backyard and might solely use Upbit?”

At press time, XRP traded at $1.45.