XRP price falls to a two-week low amid upcoming Flare Network airdrop

The price of Ripple’s third-largest digital asset XRP fell in the early hours of Sunday, December 13, below $0.50, hitting a fresh low since late November. The decline came ahead of the Flare Network airdrop, during which XRP holders will receive free Spark (FLR).

The XRP network snapshot was taken at 00:00 UTC on Saturday, December 12. At that time, 23.5 billion XRP were in circulation, 70% of which were held on exchanges.

Spark $FLR claim stats

🔹XRP Ledger Snapshot: 60155580
🔹110,259 accounts
🔹23.5 Billion XRP

— Self-custody: 7.1B XRP (30%)
— Exchanges: 16.3B XRP (70%)#XRPCommunity @FlareNetworks @ronaldonline777 pic.twitter.com/Z4MGDu7TFB

— XRP_Cro (@stedas) December 12, 2020

Among those supporting the airdrop are Coinbase, Kraken and Binance. The Spark token distribution will commence with the project network launch.

The excitement surrounding the Flare Network airdrop led to a sharp rise in XRP’s price in November, when the token briefly climbed above $0.90.

In the 24 hours before the snapshot, the number of XRP addresses with balances above 10 million tokens reached an all-time high of 339 wallets. In total, at least $1.8 billion was held on these addresses at the then prevailing price.

However, immediately after the snapshot, XRP’s price moved sharply lower. If all ten largest assets by market capitalisation rose in the past 24 hours, XRP at one point lost 8% of its value. As of this publication, the token was trading at around $0.51.

Hourly XRP/USD chart for the Bitfinex exchange from TradingView.

Flare Network is developing solutions to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to the XRP ecosystem by adding smart-contract support. The Spark governance token will be used as collateral in asset buybacks.

In late 2019, Xpring, Ripple’s investment arm, supported the development of Flare Network.

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