Want to know what’s happening with the big players in the XRP world? Crypto analyst Ali Martinez just revealed a Glassnode chart showing a pretty significant drop in active “whale” addresses on the XRP network over the past three months.

And just how big is this decline? We’re talking a whopping 50% decrease! Since December, the number of active whale addresses has plummeted from 202,250 down to 101,160. Interestingly, the peak for active wallets occurred on December 2nd, hitting around 200,000 addresses.

This drop in whale activity seems to align with other recent observations of a broader slowdown in XRP transaction volumes and overall network usage. Could this be due to a dip in demand for using the XRP network for things like remittances and payments? It’s possible we’re seeing a bit of a cooling-off period. In fact, as U.Today reported, back in January, the network experienced a significant drop in transaction volume, falling by a million transfers!

However, don’t count XRP out just yet! Fast forward to February 25th, and the XRP network witnessed an incredible surge in transaction activity. A massive 2,054,526 transactions were processed that day! It seems like a substantial amount of funds were on the move, suggesting XRP might be working to stabilize after this earlier period of decline.

Ripple Sets Sights on South Korea

Shifting gears slightly, let’s talk about Ripple’s expansion plans. Ripple President Monica Long recently took to X to share her thoughts on Ripple Custody’s brand new partnership with BDACS, a major player in digital asset institutional custody in South Korea.

Long enthusiastically stated that this partnership marks “another flag in APAC for XRP and RLUSD” for Ripple. According to Ripple’s press release, this collaboration will enable them to provide smooth XRP and RLUSD custody services to financial institutions. Furthermore, this move is expected to significantly expand the XRPL network and its ecosystem, and boost the usefulness of Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD.

The Ripple president also tweeted that South Korea is gearing up for a new wave of institutional crypto adoption, and Ripple Custody is poised to play a key role in this. Beyond that, this partnership is a strategic move for the blockchain giant to strengthen its reach in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region.

Interestingly, BDACS, Ripple’s new partner, had already forged a significant partnership in December with Woori Bank, one of South Korea’s largest banks, to offer digital asset custody services.