Year 2018 was a rough year for cryptocurrencies when it comes to price, with a couple of long, sustained collapses that “sandwiched” a brief period of stabilization. Whereas more people got familiarized with the concept of blockchain and digital assets, lots of investors lost considerable amounts of money because of the volatile market in the year that just ended.
However, that does not mean that 2018 was a completely lost year. In fact, some crypto assets in the top 20 according to their market cap can say that their networks hosted a lot of movement, transactions, and money exchanging hands. That is the case of Ripple (XRP.)
According to Ripple’s Q4 (fourth quarter) report, it sold about $535.56 million worth of XRP in the whole year. The numbers were published on January 24th. In the Q4 alone, $129.03 million worth of the cryptocurrency exchanged hands, accounting for around 0.24% of the global XRP volume.
A Positive Outlook
Overall, the Q4 presented positive results: the average XRP daily volume in that timeframe was, according to the report, equivalent to $585.7 million, the highest number since Q1. The last fact is somewhat surprising considering that the year’s second significant collapse started in mid-November, when Bitcoin and top altcoins started to see their price fall after Bitcoin Cash’s hard fork.
About $3 billion XRP were released from cryptographic escrow and $2.4 reportedly were returned during the fourth quarter. The report stated that the remaining $600 million XRP not returned to escrow are currently being used in several ways “to help support the XRP ecosystem, including the RippleNet Accelerator Program and Xpring investments like Securitize.”
Ripple remained a very active and consistent ecosystem: hosting low volatility of daily returns. The number tied to the Q4, roughly five percent, is the lowest on record since the final quarter of 2016. During 2018 Q4, the correlation of Ripple’s price fluctuations “returned to the elevated levels seen through the end of Q1 2018 through early Q3 2018.”
The Messari Report
Before the results of Ripple’s fourth quarter were published, Messari released a report in which it said that XRP’s market capitalization could be greatly overvalued, with the number even reaching $6 billion. Messari is a widely known crypto analytics company.
According to Messari’s piece, the liquid circulating supply of the planet’s second largest coin according to market cap could be overestimated by nearly 50%, with an actual number closer to $9 billion than the reported, “official” $13 billion that CoinMarketCap, the market’s most frequently visited source, currently shows.
The firm made it very clear that exact, 100% accurate statements on the matter were extremely difficult without an official disclosure from Ripple, which had not came by the time the Messari report was made public.
At the time of this writing, Ripple was trading at precisely $0.315977, down 0.58% in the last 24 hours. While it has remained one of the most stable cryptocurrencies amid the “chaos,” it has severely declined in the last calendar year: on January 4th, 2018, each XRP was trading at $3.65.
By Andres Chavez
