Ripple XRP Q1 Results Released
The San Francisco based distributed ledger startup released its Quarter 1 results on April 25. The report was put together by Miguel Vias, the company’s head of XRP markets. While there was a lot of good news in the report, there were also some downers.
The Good News
While overall market capitalization dropped in the last three month, Ripple’s XRP gained market share, with its market capitalization more than doubling in the first quarter.
XRP’s market share in the last quarter of 2017 was 3.56%, which has now increased to 7.57% in the first quarter of 2018.
The cryptocurrency’s share of market volume also went up in the first quarter from 5.3% to 6.9%. This happened thanks to XRP being included in 18 new trading platforms in the last three months. Some of the platforms to have included XRP on their lists Uphold, Abra and Anycoin Direct. In fact, the XRP trading volume went up to $160 billion after these inclusions, which is the highest it has ever been.
According to the stipulations in the company’s smart escrow contracts, Ripple got 3 billion XRP tokens from their escrows for the quarter. Of this, 300 million were used and the other 2.7 billion were put back in new escrows to be accessed in months 56, 57 and 58. Since escrows may only release 1 billion XPR tokens a month, the next set of escrows will now only be available to the startup after another 55 weeks.
Direct sales of the token from XRP II LLC, Ripple’s money services division, were at $16.6 million. An additional sale of XRPs worth $151.1 million took place. However, in comparison to the trading volume of $160 billion, these numbers account for about 0.095% of XRP sales.
The Not So Good News
While the cryptocurrency started the year with a token price of $1.91, it dropped in value to $0.50 by the end of the quarter, a massive 73% fall. However, for the second quarter of the year the price of XRP has already gone up to $0.84 so far.
One of the biggest challenges the cryptocurrencies faced (as did most of the cryptocurrency industry) was the enforcement of more stringent rules by regulators across the globe.
However, what affected XRP the most were regulations imposed in South Korea, where the cryptocurrency is exceptionally popular. Ripple took a market cap hit of 19.1% as compared to the average market impact of 7.2% after the crypto-indexing platform CoinMarketCap.com announced that it was no longer going to include South Korea’s exchange trading data from their calculations.