Quarter one of 2019 has allegedly been very big for the cryptocurrency platform Ripple in terms of sales.
Ripple Is Selling and People Are Buying
The company recently reported that sales had increased more than 31 percent over the first three months of this year. Based in San Francisco, executives claim that they sold nearly $170 million in XRP – Ripple’s official cryptocurrency. That’s about $40 million more than it had sold over the previous quarter.
This is just more evidence that the crypto boom is not a fluke. Digital assets like bitcoin have been on the rise since early April, and cryptocurrency’s popularity has been spiking. Now, companies like E-Trade have announced that they will open the doors to crypto trading for their clients thanks to ongoing demand. Fidelity was the first traditional investment firm to start this trend, and now others are fallowing in its wake.
Ripple also commented that in quarter one of 2018, the company only sold a little over $61 million. That means in roughly 12 months, the company’s sales exploded by over $100 million, and a 54 percent increase is now in the books. Programmatic sales of XRP also expanded from approximately $88 million to about $107 million – an increase of roughly 21 percent within the same timeframe.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to this equation, and that downside involves trading volume. The total volume of XRP traded across the globe decreased by approximately two percent between quarter four of last year and quarter one of this year. In all, numbers dropped from about $54 billion to $53 billion.
At the same time, it’s hard to examine this factor as a broken link in the chain. We are talking about a difference of $1 billion, which by market cap standards, isn’t much. Recently, the total cryptocurrency market cap dropped by roughly $8 billion in just a few hours following news of an alleged scam regarding Tether and Bitfinex. However, many currencies such as bitcoin, found themselves able to recover relatively quickly.
Also, trading is likely down because as we see with the previous numbers, buying is up. People are purchasing coins and holding onto them, feeling that they’ll likely expand in price. In the long run, this is likely to affect the currency’s well-being just as much as if it were being traded on a constant basis.
Ripple says that it has released approximately three billion XRP units from escrow during the first quarter of 2019, while another 2.3 billion were returned to escrow contracts. In other words, several new units were released into the field, while several others returned home.
How Ripple’s Currency Is Helping Itself
The company later explained:
The remaining 700 million XRP not returned to escrow are being used in a variety of ways to help support the XRP ecosystem.