Bitrue doubles down on eight years of XRP with 88,888 USDT in prizes, luxury cruise, and free AI trading copilot

The Bitrue crypto exchange, which serves more than 40 million users from its Costa Rica home base, has kicked off the “8 Years of Trust. Built for What’s Next” giveaway campaign to celebrate its eighth anniversary, a run that started in 2018. 

The event, the largest the exchange has ever held, is the latest commitment from a global exchange that has made Ripple’s XRP Ledger (XRPL) a critical part of the infrastructure powering its products and offerings.

How does the Bitrue anniversary event work?

According to Bitrue’s September 21 announcement, the rewards from the eighth-year anniversary campaign come in three forms: 

• The first is a daily 3,888 USDT airdrop split among users based on their daily trading activity. The higher a trader’s activity on the day, the larger their slice of the daily pool.
• The second is a competition with up to 88,888 USDT in prizes that ranks Bitrue users on a leaderboard tracking cumulative trading volume on eligible pairs in real time. 
• The third headline prize is a luxury cruise that traders qualify for by ranking near the top of the trading logs during the event. The winner will be announced after the anniversary campaign ends. 

XRP has been at the center of Bitrue’s crypto run

Bitrue has had a strong run with the Ripple network, from being the first exchange to list an XRP base pair eight years ago to listing more than 100 XRP trading pairs today. The exchange also runs its own XRPL validator.

CoinMarketCap’s tracking of exchange reserve data backs up Bitrue’s claim, with XRP wallets accounting for more than 80% of the total, while Cardano’s ADA accounts for under 2%.

Before this September event, XRP has appeared throughout Bitrue’s 2026 calendar:

• February: Ten new RLUSD spot pairs launched, linking Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin to BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, ADA and others.

Speaking during the month, Chief Marketing Officer Adam O’Neill said, “With the XRP community powering our operations over the last seven years, we’ve been able to grow into the #1 destination for all XRP needs.” O’Neill added that integrating RLUSD was “a natural extension” of that strategy as XRP develops into an institutional-grade asset.

• March: As XRP pair volumes rose as much as 200% in two weeks, a 70,000 XRP trading contest ran alongside zero-fee terms for high-volume market makers.
• July: Flexible RLUSD staking launched, with no lock-up period and daily interest.

XRPL, on its part, has justified Bitrue’s commitment with an expansion that has seen the ledger grow from a niche payments network to becoming a settlement layer for institutions and governments, including Dubai’s Land Department.

Is Bitrue only an XRP exchange?

While Bitrue has had a strong run with Ripple, the exchange supports growth in other legacy and new networks as well. 

For example, Bitrue also listed ADA at launch. The exchange also claims to be the first to list Cardano native tokens, add ADA as a base currency, and build a Go library for Cardano integration. 

“For 8 years, we have been building the ecosystem together with Cardano, and there is still work to be done,” the company said.

What is Bitrue building next?

Bitrue’s next chapter, per the exchange itself, will track three market-driving trends: the XRP ecosystem, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and AI.

On tokenized assets, Bitrue is offering what it calls first-of-its-kind retail exposure to SpaceX through 3x leveraged tokenized stock tokens. In broader terms, these are blockchain-based tokens that track a stock’s price at triple the exposure.

On AI, Bitrue AI is a trading copilot with Explainable AI built in, meaning it is designed to show the reasoning behind a strategy, not just issue a signal. It offers eight real-time strategies across three risk profiles, Aggressive, Growth and Stable, refreshed against live market data. It is free to all users during Early Access at bitrue.com/bitrue-ai-strategy.