This Korean XRP Exchange Data Has The Community | Crypto 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 that, by his estimates, has offloaded roughly 3.3 billion XRP into the XRP/KRW order guide over the past 10 months. If the analysis holds, it reframes Upbit’s XRP stream as a venue-specific phenomenon moderately than a simple reflection of global 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 selling pipeline running 24/7 for almost a year.”
Dom said the work started after an intense intraday stretch that pressured a nearer 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.”
Instead of treating that -57 million XRP cumulative quantity delta as an outlier, Dom said he zoomed out and discovered 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 large web promoting: “Apr: -165M,” “Jul: -197M,” “Oct: -382M,” and “Jan: -370M.” In complete, he put the determine at “3.3 BILLION XRP in net selling. ~$5B.”
He also argued the stream is unusually constant. “Only 1 week out of 46 was positive. One,” Dom wrote, including that there may be “no weekday/weekend distinction” and “no time of day where buying outweighs selling in aggregate.” That persistence is a component 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 said Binance’s XRP/USDT market confirmed materially less promote strain during the same home windows—“2-5x less sell pressure on the same coin,” he wrote, pointing to a June period where “Binance was net positive while Upbit bled -218M.”
He also flagged a weak relationship between the 2 venues’ hour-by-hour stream, claiming “the hourly correlation between the two venues is only 0.37,” which might indicate Upbit’s web promoting is being pushed by local components moderately than merely mirroring global positioning.
XRP Traded Cheaper In Korea For Months
Dom’s pricing observations added another layer. He said that from April through September, Upbit XRP traded “3-6% BELOW Binance,” calling it a “reverse Kimchi discount.” In his view, that element issues because it suggests the vendor was prepared to settle for 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…”
He then pointed to what he described as a structural break around 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 join that conduct to market regimes by “bucket[ing] every day by what XRP did on Binance globally,” reporting that Upbit stream skews closely unfavourable 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 help the “machine versus retail” framing, Dom contrasted order-size fingerprints on both sides of the tape. He claimed the promote facet repeatedly used round-number clips—“10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 XRP”—with “57-60% of all trades fire within 10ms,” while the buy facet confirmed a large fraction of “tiny fractional sizes,” such as “2.535, 3.679, 2.681 XRP,” which he argued is constant with KRW-denominated retail tickets like shopping for a fixed gained quantity of XRP. “One side looks like retail,” he wrote. “The other looks like a machine.”
The scale declare is also central to why the thread traveled. Dom said “3.3 billion XRP” represents “5.4% of XRP’s entire circulating supply,” moved through “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, instead posing a query he framed as the next 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.
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