Bot wallets inflate XRP Ledger’s RLUSD payment count

A cluster of 110 automated wallets made approximately 7.79 million payments in RLUSD, a dollar-backed stablecoin, between Sept. 19 and Oct. 18, according to an Oct. 19 investigation by blockchain data firm Bitquery. The transfers were worth a combined $7,722 and represented nearly all of the 7.82 million RLUSD payments recorded on the XRP Ledger during the period.

Each payment averaged about $0.001. The funds repeatedly moved to three collector addresses. On Sept. 26, RLUSD recorded 573,589 payments, but only 388 transfers were worth at least $1.

The activity also affected wider XRP Ledger statistics. From Oct. 8 to Oct. 14, the wallet cluster generated 1.58 million of the network’s 3.47 million account-to-account payments involving digital assets, or 45.6% of the total.

Bitquery identified a separate group of larger transfers. About 14,600 payments worth at least $1 moved approximately $7.33 billion during the period. Ten wallets accounted for $6.05 billion, or 82% of that amount.

The automated wallets received funding from addresses labeled as belonging to Binance. The collected funds moved through accounts resembling exchange deposit addresses. Bitquery could not determine who controlled the wallet cluster.

The activity required about 495 XRP in network fees, worth approximately $648 at the time, across 8.6 million transactions, including transfers involving XRP.

The automated activity fell sharply on Oct. 14, one day before Cross River Bank announced that it had integrated RLUSD into its core banking infrastructure. Payments to the largest collector declined from about 8,200 per hour to 1,200 on Oct. 14 and stopped early on Oct. 15. Activity at another collector fell from 1,600 payments per hour to about 11 by Oct. 16.

The bank’s announcement said the integration would allow eligible fintech companies to access RLUSD payments and continuous settlement through a single application programming interface. The service supports activities including cross-border payments and treasury transfers.

Bitquery found no increase in network fees or protocol change that explained the decline. Blockchain records also did not establish a connection between the wallet cluster’s shutdown and Cross River’s announcement.

By Oct. 17, daily RLUSD payments had fallen to about 2,000, compared with more than 500,000 at the September peak. The remaining high-value activity included 828 payments worth at least $1 million, which accounted for $6.98 billion, or about 95% of the larger-payment volume.

Another $1.47 billion involved RLUSD minting and redemptions through the issuer. Two wallets exchanged $424 million in each direction, producing $848 million in gross transfer volume without sending funds to additional counterparties.