Yesterday(October 25, 2018), Ripple released their third quarter markets report for 2018. The report explained how Ripple is growing as a company and how they view the cryptocurrency market at the moment.
Much like an earnings report, Ripple explained their financials. In Q3 2018, Ripple sold $163M of XRP tokens. This is a 122% increase over their sales in Q2 of 2018, where they sold only $74M worth of XRP. Despite growing sales, this $163M only makes up 0.43% of global XRP volume. The remaining volume is traded on third party exchanges like Binance and Bitfinex.
Of these sales, $65M was sold programmatically, while $98M was sold by XRP II, LLC. XRP II, LLC is “a Ripple subsidiary that is a registered and licensed money service business (MSB),” and makes up the majority of Ripple’s sales. Although this increase in volume shows that more institutions could be looking at XRP, the majority of XRP purchases are happening on the open market.
In regards to their treasury, Ripple took 3B XRP out of escrow at the beginning of this quarter. At the end of the quarter, they returned 2.6B, and the remaining 0.4B were used “in a variety of ways to help support the XRP ecosystem.” In the report, Ripple explains the purpose of the escrow account:
In Q4 2017, Ripple locked up 55 billion XRP in a cryptographically-secured escrow account. Ripple created the lockup to create certainty of XRP supply at any given time. Due to that lockup, Ripple has access to only 13 percent of the total XRP in circulation. Ripple’s sales were a tiny fraction of that amount.
Market Outlook
The remainder of XRP’s markets report covered their opinion of the current cryptocurrency market. The first thing to note is that volatility and volume of XRP trading is down. This reflects what’s happening in the entire cryptocurrency market, which has been quiet across this board. Although volatility has been low, XRP volatility increased towards the end of the quarter. This could’ve been in anticipation to the SWELL conference, which hosted former President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Ripple notes that although XRP has been in a downtrend for most of 2018, it is still correlated with the entire cryptocurrency market, which is also down. Unlike the entire market, Ripple saw a strong rally towards the end of Q3, as shown below:
In addition to the SWELL conference, Ripple mentions that the launch of the Coil project could bring in more bullish price swings. Coil, a web monetization product, began testing this quarter. It allows 200 websites to accept XRP payments, and could be growing in the future.
Ripple concludes its market report by talking about two interest developments in the cryptocurrency markets.
First, ICOs are drying up. The fundraising totals are declining, and ICOs are shutting down their ICO’s, unable to reach their fundraising goals. The second trend is that two countries – South Korea & Malta – are picking up volume as leaders in the cryptocurrency market. What this means is unclear, but it could mean that cryptocurrency is diversifying across the globe.
