XRP/KRW achieved net sales of $5 billion
Stupid analyzed “82 million transactions on Upbit XRP/KRW” and their net imbalance mapped over time. His key takeaway: “A $5 billion targeted sales pipeline running 24/7 for almost a year.”
Dom said the work began after an intense intraday period that forced a closer look at the tape. “It started with yesterday’s price action. -57 million XRP in CVD for 17 hours. It looked insane,” he wrote. “So I ran forensic searches: bot fingerprinting, iceberg detection, wash transaction checks. The sale was real. Algorithmic. 61% of transactions were fired within 10 ms. One bot runs for 17 hours straight with a 33 second break.”
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Instead of viewing the cumulative volume delta of -57 million XRP as an outlier, Dom said he zoomed out and found that it matched a longer-term pattern. “-57M is not an anomaly,” he wrote. “Upbit In total, he estimated the figure at “3.3 BILLION XRP in net sales. ~$5 billion.”
He also argued that the flow is unusually consistent. “Only 1 of the 46 weeks was positive. One,” Dom wrote, adding that there is “no distinction between weekday and weekend” and “no time of day when buying outweighs selling in total.” That persistence is one reason he presented it as something closer to execution infrastructure than discretionary trading. “This is not a trader,” he wrote. “It’s infrastructure.”
An important part of the thread is the comparison between locations. Dom said Binance’s
He also flagged a weak relationship between the two locations’ hour-by-hour flow, claiming that “the hourly correlation between the two locations is only 0.37,” which would imply that Upbit’s net revenue is driven by local factors rather than simply a reflection of its global positioning.
XRP traded cheaper in Korea for months
Dom’s price observations added another layer. He said Upbit XRP traded “3-6% BELOW Binance” from April through September, calling it a “reverse Kimchi discount.” He says that detail is important because it suggests the seller was willing to accept consistently worse performance than what was available elsewhere.
“For months, sellers accepted 6% worse fills than available in global markets,” Dom wrote. “They don’t care about the price. They need KRW, are required to use Upbit and/or take profit from Korean holders…”
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He then pointed to what he described as a structural break around October 10. “Korean retail went crazy. The premium rose from -0.07% to +2.4% in one day. Trading increased fivefold to 832,000,” Dom wrote, adding that the premium “has only briefly turned negative since then.” The seller did not back down in his story; the pace even increased. “And the sellers? They have doubled their daily rate. From -6.3 million per day to -11.2 million per day.”
Dom tried to link that behavior per ‘bucket’ to market regimes[ing] every day because of what XRP did globally on Binance,” reports that the Upbit flow is heavily negative on bad days and especially on crash days.
He summarized the dynamic as feedback between a systematic seller and shopper behavior: “On Mondays, Korean retail becomes a NET BUYER. They pile up,” he wrote. “On crash days, sales intensity is eight times greater. The systematic seller and retail panic reinforce each other. Korean retail buys every rip. The pipeline sells everything.”
To support the ‘machine versus retail’ framing, Dom contrasted fingerprints by order size on both sides of the tape. He claimed that the sell side repeatedly used chunks of round numbers – “10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 shopping tickets like buying a fixed winning amount of XRP. “One side looks like a retail store,” he wrote. “The other one looks like a machine.”
The scale claim is also central to why the thread traveled. Dom said that “3.3 billion XRP” represents “5.4% of the entire circulating supply of XRP,” moved through “a single trading pair, on a single exchange, in 10 months.” He emphasized that he works with trade-level datasets: “This analysis used tick trading data I collected from Upbit and Binance,” he wrote, citing “82 million Upbit trades + 444 million Binance trades.”
Dom stopped short of naming a specific entity behind the sale, instead asking a question that he framed as the next investigative step: Who can “sustain 300-400 million a month for a year,” seemingly “doesn’t care about 6% discounts,” and “specifically needs KRW or is in a walled garden and can only use Upbit?”
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $1.45.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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