To ensure transparency, Ripple voluntarily provides a quarterly report on the current state of the XRP market. I have summarised the key takeaways and provided a link to the full report for those who are interested.
Key takeaways
- Last quarter, total XRP sales were $13.08 million (USD) vs. $66.24 million the previous quarter. In addition, Ripple continued the pause of programmatic sales, focusing solely on our over-the-counter (OTC) sales with a few strategic partners, who are building XRP utility and liquidity in strategic regions including EMEA and Asia.
- Total sales (OTC-only, given programmatic pause) ended the quarter at 8bps of CCTT—this is compared to total sales in the previous quarter (OTC + programmatic) of 36bps of CCTT, representing a 78% drop QoQ.
- CCTT’s reported daily volume for XRP decreased in Q4 from Q3 2019. The average daily volume was reported at $187.34 million in Q4 versus $198.10 million in Q3, and below Q2’s reported $429.51 average daily volume.
- Based on CCTT’s closing price of XRP, XRP’s volatility of daily returns over Q4 was 3.1%, a drop in volatility from Q3’s 3.6%. XRP’s volatility over the quarter was similar to that of BTC (3.0%), and that of ETH (3.1%).
- In Q4 2019, three billion XRP were again released out of escrow (one billion each month). Of note, in December of this quarter, Ripple returned a full one billion back to escrow, for the first time ever. In total across the quarter, 2.7 billion XRP were returned and subsequently put into new escrow contracts.
- In November 2019, Ripple announced that over two dozen companies have become customers of ODL, including MoneyGram, goLance, Viamericas, FlashFX and Interbank Peru. In addition to the USD-MXN and USD-PHP ODL corridors, the company went into production with ODL payments originating from Australia into USD and PHP, and a new production ODL corridor from EUR-USD. Plans for additional corridors across APAC, EMEA and LATAM are in progress for 2020.
- 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%. 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
- Ripple made an investment in Bitso, the largest exchange in Mexico, to support RippleNet’s US-MXN corridor by providing critical liquidity for payments. Last year, Ripple launched ODL capabilities with MoneyGram into Mexico, with Bitso as the key exchange partner.
- Last quarter, Ripple acquired Strata Labs to join Xpring and focus on building ILP infrastructure, making the ILP network more accessible to developers.
- The launch of xpring.io, a new website that will serve as a central hub for developers to manage everything they need to integrate payments into their applications.
- Xpring’s investment in BRD, one of the oldest crypto wallets in the industry. BRD will build on Xpring to support and integrate XRP into the BRD wallet.
- Xpring’s investment in Towo Labs, which develops open-source software for full support of XRP on hardware wallets.
- To date, XRP derivatives have become available on several exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, OkeX, AAX and FTX. Moreover, XRP derivatives are a potentially important tool in order to manage exposures and transactions through Ripple’s cross-border payment solutions, where XRP is leveraged.
