Ripple Releases Q1 2018 Market Report – XRP Market Share Increases

Ripple has released its market report for the first quarter of 2018.

160.0 billion USD worth of XRP was traded in Q1 2018. Of this, 16.6 million USD was purchased from XRP II, which is Ripple’s South Carolina-based money service business, and $151.1 million was sold “programmatically”, according to the report.

3 billion XRP was released from  cryptographically-secured escrow during the quarter, divided equally between the 3 months. However 2.7 billion was put back into new escrow accounts. The remaining 300 million XRP is being used to invest in the network.

Ripple says that the total market capitalisation of all its digital assets is 263.5 billion USD, a fall of 56.3 percent from 603.7 billion USD at the beginning of the year.

The value of XRP was 1.91 USD at the beginning of the year and 0.51 USD at the end of the quarter, a fall of 73 percent. Ripple notes that this is representative of the price movement of the cryptocurrency market as a whole.

One factor which affected the value was the decision of the listing website coinmarketcap.com to remove all South Korean exchanges from its roster. Because XRP has a large share in that market, its displayed price dropped disproportionately when compared to other assets.

Ripple notes that the price of its coin was also heavily affected by regulatory developments in South Korea – rumours of a total ban on cryptocurrency caused XRP the most volatility since April 2017.

The report notes some exceptions, notably that while the total market capitalisation of all digital assets doubled between the dates 24/11/17 to 31/3/18, XRP’s share of that capitalisation grew from 3.56 to 7.57 percent. This was partly due to its listing in 18 additional venues over that period, so that now it can be accessed on 60 different cryptocurrency exchanges.

This positive result can also be explained by several new partnerships – in the first quarter of the year Ripple announced pilot schemes with Western Union, Cambridge Global Payments, MercuryFX, IDT and MoneyGram