Ripple has done pretty well in the first Quarter even though the prices did not surge to a great extent, the shares have increased. The rally that began during the final quarter of 2017 continued its legacy to the start of the quarter this new year. Here is everything that you need to know about Ripple’s Q1 performance, as released by Ripple in their reports.

Significantly large volumes of XRP were traded in the first quarter which added to the programmatic sales increase especially in the first half of Q1.

1. Traders purchased $16.6 million directly from XRP II LLC, which is their Money Service Business [MSB] – registered and licensed.
2. The company sold $151.1 million worth XRP programmatically, as a small percentage of overall exchange volume which represented 0.095% of the $160B XRP traded globally in Q1.

3 billion XRP was released out of a cryptographically-secured escrow account during the first quarter this year and 2.7 billion XRP was put back into new escrow contracts. The left out XRP worth 300 million is being utilized for various support causes to invest in their ecosystem.

Overall market cap, volume and price charts

XRP began with an appreciable $1.91 and closed the quarter with $0.51 which is a 73% drop on the whole. The total capitalization of all Digital Assets mirrored XRP’s overall market cap with a slight exaggeration while comparing at times.

The total market cap of all digital assets was at $603.7 billion at the beginning of the year and peddled up to $835.5 billion within a week while it finished the quarter with a decline of 56.3% accounting to $263.5 billion.

XRP had its highest volume this quarter ever in the history with a total of $160 billion notional traded. Despite XRP following broader market price action, in the beginning, there were some observed deviations. The overall market volume grew noticeably, from 5.3% (Q4 2017) to 6.9% (Q1 2018), a part of which was driven by 18 new venues listing XRP. The Q1 XRP listings included some huge names like Abra and Uphold bringing a total count of exchanges to more than 60.

The new ability to secure cost-effective and capital-efficient XRP loans have reduced challenges for market makers in terms of their involvement in XRP markets. The added flexibility also allows liquidity providers to tighten spreads as their margins aren’t hampered by the high costs of sourcing inventory or by the risk of holding significant amounts of inventory. For Ripple, this additional liquidity is useful for xRapid as it increases the capacity of order books to support cross-border payments. Also, incremental liquidity in order books will lower volatility over time, further increasing XRP’s ability to provide on-demand liquidity for xRapid, mentioned the report.

News Highlights

The year to date has been dominated by Ripple’s headlines ranging from xRapid announcements to regulatory developments worldwide.

1. xRapid: Began with 5 new pilot customers announcements – Western Union, Cambridge Global Payments, MercuryFX, IDT and MoneyGram as Ripple looks forward to more pilots and to produce the existing ones.
2. Coinmarketcap’s sudden decision of eliminating all South Korean digital assets from all of its index prices artificially erased $100 billion worth market value and negatively affected XRP’s relatively high share of volume. XRP thus declined by 1.91% in comparison to the other top 5 coins which declined by 7.2%.
3. Regulatory developments: Mexico’s Senate approving a bill to create a regulatory framework for FinTech and other digital assets, The European Commission’s FinTech action plan issued, The United Kingdom’s government announcement of the cryptocurrency assets task force.

Cathy Doug, a Ripple enthusiast says:

“XRP Army?? Danggg…they got you on your knees. I wish you all would wake up. A plenty of global corporations using Ripple’s products. Your preferred companies will be using them too soon enough.”

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