Ripple Sold Over $250M XRP in Q2 2019
Ripple, the company behind the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, published on Wednesday its XRP Markets Report. Besides the sales figures, the company came with several announcements related to XRP and Ripple’s products Xpring and RippleNet.
Ripple Sold More Tokens Than Ever
In the second quarter of this year, Ripple sold $251.51 million worth of XRP tokens. Now the company is significantly cutting future sales. The market cap of Ripple was up also thanks to the bullish sentiment in the crypto market as a whole.
Ripple mentioned the challenges that it faces when it tries to accurately measure the trading volumes. It decided to use data from CryptoCompare’s Top Tier (CCTT), as it omits most of the unverified volumes.
During the second quarter, Ripple sold $144.64 million worth of XRP in programmatic sales and $106.87 million in institutional direct sales. For those unfamiliar, programmatic sales suggest the sale of tokens without directly communicating with the buyers. In other words, it is about most of the trading taking place on crypto exchanges. As of today, XRP is listed on more than 130 exchanges worldwide, including 12 news exchanges that listed the token in the last three months.
The total amount of $251.5 million in XPR sold in the second quarter is the biggest quarterly sum that the company has ever sold.
Since the last quarter of 2016, Ripple has sold $1.14 billion of XRP in total, according to the Block. About 36% of this was sold via crypto exchanges, while the rest was sold directly to institutions.
The daily volume also increased during the quarter. As per CCTT, XRP’s daily volume was $429.51 in the second quarter compared to $156.01 million in Q1. For reference, Coinmarketcap shows an average daily volume of $1.74 billion.
RippleNet Expands
Ripple’s blockchain network RippleNet, which is used by over 200 companies worldwide, saw the highest number of client transactions over the quarter. The volume of xRapid transactions jumped 170% compared to the first quarter. Also, Ripple said the number of xRapid partners increased too.
In mid-June, Ripple announced a partnership with money transfer giant MoneyGram. The companies agreed to collaborate for two years, during which the XRP operator will become MoneyGram’s main partner for international payments and forex settlement. Ripple will offer its blockchain network and XRP as an intermediate currency for rapid settlement. As part of the agreement, Ripple pledged to provide a capital commitment to MoneyGram, which allows the latter to draw $50 million in exchange for company stock at a price of $4.10 per share.
In its report, Ripple also touched upon regulatory updates. Thus, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that it would set up nodes on several open-source ledgers, including XRP Ledger, to track the network processes and collect data for its policymaking. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) compared XRP to ETH, which is referred to as a utility/exchange token instead of a security token.
Anatol has been writing for our news site for a year and is the newest member of our team. While he’s new to us, he’s certainly not new to trading with over 10 years’ experience being a professional financial journalist and working in the markets.