As with any other company that treasures transparency, Ripple released its Q1 XRP markets report yesterday offering a deeper insight into the performance of its digital asset. The report which was compiled by Ripple’s head of XRP markets, Miguel Vias was comprehensive and covered XRP’s fall in price since the year began as well as its inclusion on new platforms which has raised its overall market volume.
In Q1, market participants purchased $16.6 million directly from XRP II LLC, Ripple’s registered and licensed money service business. The company also sold $151.1 million worth of XRP from their holdings which compared to the overall market volume was quite a small percentage. With the overall exchange volume traded globally amounting to just over $160 billion, the amount of XRP sold by Ripple was a mere 0.095 percent. The company also released three billion worth of XRP from their escrow but only 300 million XRP was used by the company with the remaining 2.7 billion XRP being placed in new escrow contracts that will only be accessible from month 56. (As stipulated by Ripple’s cryptographically secured commitment, they can only access one billion of the 55 escrowed per month which gives them 55 months)
XRP’s price has gone down by 73% for the quarter, having begun the quarter on 1st January at $1.91 and ended the quarter at $0.51. The drop was not unique to XRP as the whole market took a huge hit in general. However, Ripple’s drop was among the greatest. Nevertheless, the market participants’ interest in Ripple was at an all-time high with $160 billion worth of XRP traded in the quarter.
Among the most exciting news for XRP enthusiasts was that XRP’s share of the overall market capitalization doubled! In the last quarter, XRP’s share of market cap stood at just 3.56% but had more than doubled and stood at 7.57% at the time the report was compiled. (It has since then had a small increase and as at the time of press stood at 7.97%).
XRP’s rise to the top was further boosted by the adoption of xRapid by 5 new clients. xRapid is Ripple’s transfer product that uses XRP for transfers increasing efficiency and speed while cutting costs. The new clients are Western Union, Cambridge Global Payments, MercuryFX, IDT and MoneyGram. XRP was also added to 18 new venues in the quarter including Abra and Uphold.
