This Korean XRP Exchange Data Has The Community | XRP News

Crypto market researcher Dom (@traderview2) says he’s recognized what seems to be 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 ebook over the previous 10 months. If the evaluation holds, it reframes Upbit’s XRP move as a venue-specific phenomenon relatively 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 internet imbalance over time. His headline conclusion: “A $5 billion one directional selling pipeline running 24/7 for almost a year.”

Dom stated the work started after an intense intraday stretch that compelled a nearer take a look at the tape. “It started with yesterday’s price action. -57M XRP in CVD over 17 hours. It looked insane,” he wrote. “So I ran forensic queries – bot fingerprinting, iceberg detection, wash trade checks. The selling was real. Algorithmic. 61% of trades fired within 10ms. Single bot running 17 hours straight with one 33 second pause.”

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

He additionally argued the move is unusually constant. “Only 1 week out of 46 was positive. One,” Dom wrote, including that there’s “no weekday/weekend distinction” and “no time of day where buying outweighs selling in aggregate.” That persistence is an element of why he framed it as one thing nearer to execution infrastructure than discretionary trading. “This isn’t a trader,” he wrote. “It’s infrastructure.”

A key half of the thread is the cross-venue comparability. Dom stated Binance’s XRP/USDT market confirmed materially much less sell stress during the identical home windows—“2-5x less sell pressure on the same coin,” he wrote, pointing to a June period the place “Binance was net positive while Upbit bled -218M.”

He additionally flagged a weak relationship between the 2 venues’ hour-by-hour move, claiming “the hourly correlation between the two venues is only 0.37,” which might suggest Upbit’s internet promoting is being pushed by native components relatively than merely mirroring world positioning.

XRP Traded Cheaper In Korea For Months

Dom’s pricing observations added one other layer. He stated that from April by means 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 simply accept persistently worse execution than what was accessible elsewhere.

“The sellers were accepting 6% worse fills than available on global markets, for many months,” Dom wrote. “They don’t care about the price. They need KRW, are mandated to use Upbit, and/or are Korean holders taking profit…”

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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 only briefly gone negative since.” The vendor, in his telling, didn’t back off—if something, the tempo elevated. “And the sellers? They doubled their daily rate. From -6.3M/day to -11.2M/day.”

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

He summarized the dynamic as suggestions between a systematic vendor and retail conduct: “On moon days, Korean retail becomes a NET BUYER. They’re accumulating,” he wrote. “On crash days, sell intensity is 8x heavier. The systematic seller + retail panic amplify each other. Korean retail buys every rip. The pipeline sells into all of it.”

To assist the “machine versus retail” framing, Dom contrasted order-size fingerprints on each side of the tape. He claimed the sell aspect repeatedly used round-number clips—“10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 XRP”—with “57-60% of all trades fire within 10ms,” whereas the buy aspect confirmed a massive fraction of “tiny fractional sizes,” comparable to “2.535, 3.679, 2.681 XRP,” which he argued is per KRW-denominated retail tickets like shopping for a fixed received quantity of XRP. “One side looks like retail,” he wrote. “The other looks like a machine.”

The scale declare can be central to why the thread traveled. Dom stated “3.3 billion XRP” represents “5.4% of XRP’s entire circulating supply,” moved by means of “a single trading pair, on a single exchange, in 10 months.” He emphasised he’s working from trade-level datasets: “This analysis used tick trade data I collected from Upbit and Binance,” he wrote, citing “82M Upbit trades + 444M Binance trades.”

Dom stopped short of naming a particular entity behind the promoting, as a substitute posing a query he framed as the following investigative step: who can maintain “300-400M per month for a year straight,” seemingly “doesn’t care about 6% discounts,” and “needs KRW specifically or is in some walled garden and can only use Upbit?”

At press time, XRP traded at $1.45.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com