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Binance just sent a whopping $1.26 billion worth of Bitcoin between its cold wallets in an epic show of the power and potential of cryptocurrency.
The move is designed to keep its assets secure and was announced ahead of time by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
Binance sent the BTC in two transactions at a total cost of just $124.60 in network fees, highlighting some of crypto’s greatest strengths – the ability to move value fast and cheap without risk of censorship, without the need for a middleman like a bank or government, and without having to move cumbersome physical objects like paper cash or gold bars.
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If Binance were to try to lug the same amount of value in gold bars from one place to another, it would have been a logistical nightmare.
The current price of gold is about $1,284 an ounce, and standard gold bars held by central banks weigh roughly 400 ounces. With each gold bar worth $513,600, Binance would have had to lug 2,453 gold bars weighing 61,325 pounds to move $1.26 billion in gold from one vault to another.
Binance split the cryptocurrency movements into two transactions, sending them both within 15 minutes – no armored trucks involved.
Meanwhile, crypto whale watchers are tracking a big XRP transaction from Ripple. The San Francisco startup unlocked 200 million XRP worth $89 million from escrow, placing it into one of its company wallets. Unlocking XRP from escrow costs a fraction of a penny.
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Ripple, which owns more than half of the total supply of all XRP in existence, routinely moves its holdings in and out of escrow in order to sell portions of its assets to crypto exchanges and other institutional participants.
Ripple says it sold $169.42 million worth of XRP in the first quarter of this year, which is a 31% increase from the previous quarter.
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