XRP addresses ramp up as Spark airdrop looms

XRP holders will see an airdrop of 45 billion Spark tokens on 12 December. Any owner of XRP tokens will receive the token in a 1:1 ratio, which by extension means that there could be 100 billion Spark tokens created. This will be carried out by the Flare Network, an airdrop backed by Ripple’s investment arm RippleX [formerly known as Xpring].

With the aforementioned airdrop looming large, data provider Santiment recently noted that “Ripple’s addresses have grown rapidly” over the past few days.

Such a rise was particularly seen in addresses with over 10 million tokens, which, according to XRP’s press time value, meant that the value was as high as approximately $5.67 million. This was an indication of the fact that XRP holders seemed to be preparing for the airdrop.

The said airdrop has excluded Ripple Inc, non-participating exchanges, Jed McCaleb, and accounts that are known to have received XRP as a result of fraud, theft, and scams. Flare explained,

“Unlike Ripple Inc and the non participating exchanges, the Spark balances that would have gone to these excluded participants are instead to be placed in a reward pool to incentivise the minting of F-Assets starting with FXRP”

As per Flare’s latest update, at least 95 exchanges are supporting its Spark airdrop. These include prominent exchanges like Binance, OKEx, Kraken, Huobi, FTX, Coinbase, and others. Owing to the upcoming airdrop, the exchanges will perform a snapshot on users’ XRP holdings. In fact, Binance went as far as providing additional information to its clients regarding the snapshot,

“When Binance performs the snapshot on users’ XRP (XRP) holdings for the Spark (SPARK) airdrop, it will only count XRP positions in spot wallets, savings accounts, and coin-margined futures wallets. XRP holdings in margin accounts and crypto loans will be excluded.”

It should be noted, however, that at the time of writing, it was still unclear what impact the airdrop would have on XRP’s value.