• Ripple’s XRP Ledger currently has recorded a transaction volume of over 4.1 million transactions per day yesterday.
• In the crypto community there is speculation as to whether the increased volume comes from Ripple partners such as MoneyGram or MercuryFX.

Since late October 2019, Ripple’s cryptocurrency XRP has seen a sharp increase in the total number of transactions per day. Until October 21, 2019, the transaction volume per day was relatively constant between 800,000 and 900,000 transactions per day. Since then, however, it has literally exploded.

Especially in the last few days, the volume has increased significantly. While it stood at around 1.2 million on 19 November 2019, it climbed to 4.1 million transactions yesterday (23 November). This is shown by the data from bitinfocharts.com. The transaction volume is thus significantly higher than that of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), with the Ethereum Blockchain processing 631,670 transactions and the Bitcoin Blockchain 306,251 transactions yesterday.

Is MoneyGram or MercuryFX behind the climb?

Of course, the question is why the XRP volume has increased so dramatically. There is a lot of speculation within the crypto community – is it a stress test from Ripple, a payment service provider or a bank using XRP, a trading bot or maybe an XRP whale?

The first theory seems very unlikely, since the heavily increased transaction volume has already been visible for over 4 weeks without Ripple making a statement on a test. David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple, also practically denied a stress test on 31st October by reacting to the rising transaction volume and explaining:

One of the downsides to low transaction fees on the ledger is that the cost to send lots of low value transactions is negligible.

There is also no official notification from any bank or payment service provider. While MoneyGram announced in early November that it would open up four new payment corridors for XRP, it has not made any detailled announcement. Mercury FX also recently announced that it will expand its use of ODL (On Demand Liquidity) and XRP. However, this theory seems more like wishful thinking by the XRP community.

Much more likely is the theory of Big Data analyst Thomas Silkjær, who says that the XRP Ledger is currently being bombarded with spam transactions:

The XRPL is currently processing roughly 90 transactions per second while being “under attack” by countless payments serving no purpose, other than burning fees. The minimum fee has increased by 2 drops (or ~USD 0,000045).

Silkjær tracked the origin of the transactions and found that a person sends a large number of IOUs through the ledger. The XRP Ledger has an integrated decentralized exchange with an IOU system. This allows any type of asset to be traded electronically.

Somebody has spent 40K+ XRP to activate more than 2000 accounts, that is slowly burning away all the account reserve by sending non-XRP payment transactions.

This is actually a funny thing about the XRPL. If you have IOUs, you cannot risk, not being able to spend it, even if your account reserve is low. As long as you have enough XRP left in the account to pay for fees, you can spend it.

The person behind the account is unknown. Also the purpose of the attack can only be guessed. It could be someone trying to see if he can overload the XRP Ledger (XRPL) or at least increase the transaction fees.

The goal of the attacker could also be a manipulation, which creates the impression that the XRPL is used strongly, in order to create the impression of much “buying activity”. This impression in turn could motivate investors to buy XRP.

In fact, the account still has over 8,000 XRP before the account is completely empty.