Ripple is back in the news as it reports a nice 31% increase in its XRP sales over the first quarter of 2019. That’s a total of $169.42 million within the first 3 months of 2019 as compared to the $129.03 million over the same period last year.
Of these sales, institutions bought about $61.93 million worth of XRP directly from Ripple, marking a 54% increase in direct sales in Q1. Over the same period, automatic sales grew by 21% from $88.88 million to $107.49 million.
Bad News?
While Ripple’s XRP sales increased, the same cannot be said of the trading market for the crypto. During Q1 of 2019, the total global trade of XRP experienced a 2% decrease from the $54.82 million traded last year to $53.85 of this year.
Supporting The XRP Ecosystem
According to Ripple, the company released a total of 3 billion XRP tokens into the market during Q1 2019. Of these, 2.3 billion were recouped and locked in new escrow holdings. With that done, Ripple plans to use the extra XRP in its efforts to support the crypto’s ecosystem.
120 Exchanges
XRP has gained great popularity over the last few years, growing to become the 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Bitcoin and Ethereum come first and second respectively. However, there have been a few occasions where XRP has toppled Ethereum to take the second position.
Currently, XRP is listed and available for trading on over 120 exchanges across the world. Within the first 3 months of 2019 alone, XRP was added and availed for trading by about 19 new crypto exchanges. This indicates the crypto’s growing popularity as well as Ripple’s growing efforts in propping it up.
Low Volatility
While the crypto market has been known to be very volatile, XRP has made a name as one of the most stable cryptos around. Between January and March 2019, XRP marked its second least volatile quarter, with Q4 of 2013 making history as the least volatile period for XRP.
