Ripple, the blockchain company behind the third-largest cryptocurrency, has posted the lowest XRP sales. The company reported about an 87 percent decline in the first quarter of 2020, which defines a huge loss for the company when compared to the other sales.
Ripple sees $1.75 million in XRP sales
The previous sales in the last quarter of 2019 clocked to $13.08 million according to the report. However, the company disclosed that XRP sales reached as low as $1.75 million in Q1 this year. The report went on to relate the sharp decline to some factors.
Among the reasons behind XRP sales drop is the decline in institutional sales. Another reason is the pauses noted in the sales of XRP to different digital currency exchanges, which are usually referred to as programmatic sales.
The blockchain company mentioned in the report that it mostly directed the XRP sales on over-the-counter (OTC). Additionally, the major regions targeted through this medium include Asia, Africa, Europe, and also the Middle East.
Significant driver of XRP sales
From the report, the programmatic sales of the Ripple cryptocurrency have been the significant driver of XRP sales, not until Q3 last year, where the blockchain company began pausing such sales. Since then, the sales continued to drop to the extent of reaching 80 percent fall in the Q4 of that year.
Ripple explained that it had to pause the sales to crypto exchanges due to cases of inflated volumes. Meanwhile, the sales so far are reportedly the lowest since the company began posting its crypto sales report.
At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading with a 1.84 percent price change, to be worth $0.223268 per coin. At a 24h volume of $2,598,238,299, XRP market capitalization is now at $9,848,974,197. Also, there are 44,112,853,111 XRP in circulation, out of the 100 billion max supply.
1 billion XRP released from escrow
There are speculations on the potential fall of XRP price, as Ripple has been observing a supposed tradition, however, in a different method since this year.
The blockchain company usually releases a total of one billion units of its cryptocurrency, in order to increase the crypto’s liquidity, according to Brad Garlinghouse, CEO at Ripple. However, the company opted to observe this twice, as one portion will consist of 500 million XRPs.
While this event is expected to result in more liquidity for the third-largest crypto, many people in the XRP community think this activity could be the actual barrier that has been stopping XRP from hitting another biggest point.
