Recent reports have put the spotlight on Ripple Labs and how much the firm surprisingly earned, in the middle of the biting bear market that rocked the cryptosphere in 2018. According to the study, Ripple Labs successfully pocketed over $700 million, proceeds from dumping their XRP tokens to the firm’s investors.
Ripple’s Dumps
In the beginning, Ripple began by mining 100 billion XRP tokens as the available supply. All these tokens were created before it officially launched and only 20% at the time, was publicly available.
The remaining 80% was held by the firm, its co-founders and other affiliated entities. Since then, these tokens have been dumped to investors, from time to time. Mostly, the coins are sold when Ripple needs to finance other ventures or when an affiliated firm or partner is moving on from the firm.
A study has shown that for about five years now, Ripple has been consistently dumping about 2.4 billion XRP tokens, annually. Last year, however, the dumping continued as usual but with a little difference.
Even though most of the market had lost so much value, Ripple’s dumps helped it earn a whopping $533.6 million in profit. This probably left a sour taste in the mouths of XRP investors because, in that period, the digital asset lost 88% of its BTC pairing value.
Today, XRP is at a 19-month low, trading at $0.323. This is a sharp contrast from January 2018, when XRP was at $3.84. Furthermore, Ripple dumped an additional $169.42 million worth of XRP in the 1st quarter of 2019 and is still expected to dump more, especially as the coin’s BTC value is still plummeting.
Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
The fate of altcoins, in general, is still quite tricky with most people still willing to watch as time passes. However, a trader – @Rektcapital – took to Twitter to show that there might be some promise to XRP’s future. According to the tweet:
“For the first time since December 2017, Ripple has recently rebounded from a long-standing uptrend line.”
However, according to popular trader Peter Brandt, things might not be looking up for altcoins. Brandt said:
“While the parabola in BTC was subject to different renderings, the parabola in the total market cap chart was loud and clear. Total cap should correct 80%. Most of the damage of decline will occur to altcoins.”
