Ripple Reports 80% Decline in XRP Sales in the Fourth Quarter

The American fintech company Ripple on Wednesday presented its new report for the fourth quarter of 2019, indicating a sharp decline in sales of cryptocurrency XRP.

According to the document, the total sales of XRP in the fourth quarter amounted to $13.08 million, while in the third quarter it was equal to $66.24 million. Thus, the magnitude of the drop was close to 80%. The change in value was, among other things, affected by the complete halt of the so-called “programmed sales” of XRP, carried out through the Ripple affiliate network. According to the report, in the fourth quarter, Ripple sold cryptocurrency only directly to institutional investors.

Image: Ripple

Ripple is guided by the volume of XRP trading in the market when determining the amount of cryptocurrency available to it for sale. As promised, the company moved to a more moderate approach in evaluating trading volumes:

“As readers may recall, in Q2 2019, Ripple shifted to a more conservative volume benchmark for XRP sales, away from CoinMarketCap and to CryptoCompare Top Tier (CCTT) and significantly reduced XRP sales. In Q3 2019, Ripple further reduced XRP sales and paused programmatic sales. Ripple maintained this approach throughout the entirety of Q4. However, obtaining publicly available sources of trusted trading volume remains to be an ongoing challenge. There is still much progress to be made, and Ripple will continue to evaluate its benchmarks and work proactively with industry participants toward addressing the persistence of fake volumes in industry volume data.”

The average daily XRP trading volume on the market in the fourth quarter also decreased from $198.10 million to $187.34 million. In the second quarter, the figure was $429.51 million.

Image: Ripple

The company explains that last quarter it extracted 3 billion XRP from its storage and adds: “Note that in December Ripple returned a billion tokens back to the storage, for the first time in its history.” A total of 2.7 billion XRPs were returned to the repository.

Ripple also continues to expand its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) partner network, which can use XRP for settlements, and in November alone added “over two dozen” companies, including MoneyGram, goLance and Viamericas.

“In 2019, dollar value transacted through ODL increased more than a hundred times between Q1 and Q4, and specifically from Q3 to Q4, by 650%,” writes Ripple. “The number of ODL transactions also increased by 390% from Q3 to Q4, showcasing high customer demand for leveraging digital assets, specifically XRP, in cross-border transactions.”

Author: Marko Vidrih

Featured image credit: Pixabay