The first thing Ripple did this new year is the release of funds valued at $192 million from its escrow.

Whale Alert was able to catch the recent XRP tokens consignment by scanning data from the XRP. The consignment is an installment of a pre-planned release plan Ripple started in 2017.

Then, the officials of Ripple revealed in a blog post that the firm plans to lock up 55 billion XRP, releasing funds every month within 55 months.

According to the officials, it was aimed at incentivizing investors to maintain interest and ensure consistent usage of XRP. As seen in the blog post:

“We use Escrow to establish 55 contracts of 1 billion XRP each that will expire on the first day of every month from months 0 to 54. As each contract expires, the XRP will become available for Ripple’s use. You can expect us to continue to use XRP for incentives to market makers who offer tighter spreads for payments and selling XRP to institutional purchasers.”

Before Ripple started the scheme, it was selling $300 million worth of XRP per month. Nevertheless, in the previous year, there was noticeable intensification of sell-offs, as Ripple disposed more tokens than ever.

Likewise, the escrow movements could not bring about a decline in the prices of XRP/BTC and XRP/USD pairs. Currently there’s a decline in the price of XRP/USD to over two-year lows last month.

However, David Schwartz claimed that XRP purchases did not really make the company any richer. He maintained that the firm’s selloffs are unimportant.

XRP did not really react to the escrow release, as its price was study over $0.19 while the prices of other leading altcoins decline by almost 1 percent.