Crypto watchers were buzzing on Monday, and for good reason: two significant cryptocurrency transfers caught everyone’s eye as large sums of XRP and Dogecoin were moved to Binance from an address that raised eyebrows.

These transactions landed on the same Monday that the crypto market experienced a bit of a wobble. To put it in perspective, both XRP and Dogecoin had each dipped by 13% recently, mirroring Bitcoin’s quick drop to $76,000 earlier that day.

The buzz started when Whale Alert, the popular on-chain tracker, flagged the hefty transactions in a post on X. The post highlighted an unknown crypto address sending funds to Binance, a leading exchange. This immediately fueled speculation that a big player, a “whale,” might be selling off their holdings amidst the somewhat shaky market conditions.

Breaking Down the Transfers

According to reports from Whale Alert itself, the address labeled “DU8gPC,” an unidentified wallet at the time, shifted a massive 300 million DOGE to Binance. This Dogecoin haul, valued at $41.7 million, moved earlier today at 9:52 AM UTC.

Just two seconds later, another mysterious wallet, known as “rPz2qA,” sent 200 million XRP, a hefty $354.6 million worth, to yet another Binance-linked wallet. While these were separate transactions from different senders, their near-simultaneous timing definitely sparked curiosity and chatter among those watching the market.

Digging a little deeper, further examination confirmed that the recipient addresses were indeed owned by Binance, the top crypto exchange by trading volume. However, the identity of the original sending addresses initially remained unclear, although hints suggested connections to a well-known entity.

So, What Actually Happened?

By using Arkham, a market analysis platform, to investigate the Dogecoin sending address, it turned out the wallet was, in fact, also part of Binance! The “DU8gPC” address was identified as one of Binance’s DOGE cold storage wallets, and the receiving address was its hot wallet.

Further investigation using Bithomp also verified that the XRP sending address was linked to Binance. Data revealed that an address associated with the exchange had activated it back in December 2023 with a small amount of 70 XRP and had since been using it as a cold, self-custody wallet for significant XRP holdings.

Putting it all together, it became clear that both the Dogecoin and XRP movements were internal shuffles within Binance. Specifically, they were transfers from Binance’s cold wallets to its hot wallets. Exchanges often perform these kinds of internal transfers to increase the available funds in their hot wallets, usually in preparation for anticipated surges in deposits or withdrawals to maintain platform liquidity.

Interestingly, Binance has a history of these internal wallet movements. The Crypto Basic previously reported on a similar event in September, involving a 95 million XRP transfer (worth $50 million at the time) between two wallets owned by Binance.

Adding to the pattern, another internal transfer happened in August when Binance moved 60 million XRP from the same sending address as today’s XRP transaction. Intriguingly, the exchange also sent this $39 million sum of XRP to the very same receiving address involved in today’s activity.

As of now, XRP is trading at $1.85, and DOGE is priced at $0.1452.