The cryptocurrency market has been on the move in the past week, and even though XRP was a little sluggish at first, it managed to catch up and register some impressive gains lately.

At the time, it seems as if Ripple whales are preparing for an even bigger price surge, given their most recent behavior.

Ripple Whales Stack Up

Santiments data shows that larger wallets, those holding at least a million of the now seventh-largest digital asset, have been accumulating aggressively lately. They now own over 45 billion XRP, which is the highest level held by them since June 2018.

Wallets with at least 1M XRP now hold a combined 45.61B tokens, their highest amount held since June, 2018. In the past 2 years, whales sharks have reversed course and accumulated 3.44B more XRP, a +8.16% increase. Traders have enjoyed a +40% return in the past 7 days. pic.twitter.com/nzYNU3CJyW

According to this chart, whales holdings had dumped to multi-year lows of under 42 billion tokens during the peak bear market at the end of 2022 after the collapse of FTX. Since then, though, they have been on an accumulation spree that exploded in the past week, ever since Donald Trumps victory in the US presidential elections.

Theres been a lot of positive sentiment around Ripples native token in the past week due to the aforementioned change in the US leadership scene. The current Democrat-led government and the Gensler-spearheaded SEC have been vocally and legally going after numerous crypto companies, including Ripple.

However, with Trump promising to fire Gensler on day 1 and the overall Republican win during the elections, rumors have started to speculate that the current SEC chair will step down even before January and will be replaced by someone with a more favorable approach to the industry.

XRP to Surge Further?

XRP is the top performer from the larger-cap alts in the past day, surpassing $0.8 for the first time in over a year after a 15% surge. With the aforementioned positive bias going toward its way, the number of highly optimistic price predictions have skyrocketed.

As reported earlier, several crypto analysts outlined the next targets for XRP. Starting from overcoming $1, which sounds rather reasonable at the moment, some envisioned triple-digit increases to up to $3.3.

However, most of those are based on speculations, at least for now. After all, Gensler hasnt officially resigned yet, and theres no indication of who the eventual successor will be and how they will treat the legal case between the SEC and Ripple.