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Ripple Labs has unveiled their quarterly market report, and things appear positive overall. Between its two major operations, Ripple Labs and Ripple II, which caters to institutional investors and is fully licensed, the firm moved more than $160 million in ripple (XRP). Interestingly, these sales accounted for less than half a percent of the total volume of the market, meaning that trading in ripple has been on a volatile upswing.
The ripple price has risen dramatically over time, currently sitting at over 40 cents a token. With a total market supply of some 100 billion tokens, the network as a whole is currently priced around $40 billion (though just $18.5 billion of those funds are currently in circulation).
As with all crypto assets, however, liquidity for a figure of that sort is unlikely. Actual liquid cash convertible from XRP might be in the low hundreds of millions as opposed to billions. Nevertheless, this is a vast improvement over the days when it would have taken 200 XRP to make a dollar.
Last year, Ripple locked up 55 billion of its own XRP supply to create stability in the trading markets. The move appears to have played well with the psychology of the cryptocurrency investment community.
Over the past three months, 3 billion of that 55 billion have returned to the hands of Ripple, with 2.6 billion being thus returned to escrow. The report explains:
“In Q3 2018, 3 billion XRP was again released out of escrow (1 billion each month). 2.6 billion XRP was subsequently put into new escrow contracts. […] The remaining 400 million XRP not returned to escrow is being used in a variety of ways to help support the XRP ecosystem.”
An interesting factoid from the report is that for most of the third quarter of this year, Maltese exchanges led the way in terms of trading volume.
“Over the last six months, Malta has proposed a number of rules that create a clear legal framework for the trading of digital assets. Additionally, Malta lets international companies pay as little as 5 percent in corporate taxes. Prime Minister Dr. Joseph Muscat has called cryptocurrencies ‘the inevitable future of money.’ This has led to a number of large crypto firms, including Binance and OKEX Technology, moving their operations to the Mediterranean island nation.”
Ripple continues to be one of the leading digital currency outfits, and the firm touts regulatory compliance as its modus operandi. The firm has frequently butted heads with traditional cryptocurrency advocates due to its outspoken propensity for government oversight as well as claims that the network itself is centralized. Nevertheless, Ripple appears to be flourishing.
Featured Image from Shutterstock. Charts from TradingView.
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