Ripple Releases 1 Billion XRP ($309 Million) from Escrow

Ripple Releases 1 Billion XRP ($309 Million) from Escrow

Ripple has released one billion XRP worth about $309 million from its escrow account at the start of May 2019, according to Twitter user Whale Alert.

In a recently released Q1 2019 performance, the company revealed total XRP sales of $169 million between January and March 2019. The token is the third-ranked cryptocurrency according to CoinMarketCap.

First Q2 Escrow Withdrawal

In a tweet posted in the early hours of May 1, 2019, Whale Alert reported the first one billion XRP released from the Ripple Escrow wallet in Q2 2019. Presently, one billion XRP is worth about $109 million.

Each month, Ripple unlocks one billion XRP from its escrow which is put to a variety of uses. Some of these uses include the development of the XRP ecosystem and the servicing of exchange platforms.

According to the company’s December 2017 blog post explaining how its escrow works, the one billion XRP does not affect the circulating supply of XRP. An excerpt from the post reads:

“If an escrow is successfully finished, it delivers the XRP held to its destination account. If the escrow is canceled, it delivers the XRP back to the source account.”

Of the three billion XRP released from escrow in Q1 2019, the company returned 2.3 billion to its escrow account.

Ripple Q1 2019 Financials

In a related development, Ripple recently released its Q1 financials for 2019. According to the report, the company sold $169.42 million in XRP tokens during the period.

Compared to Q1 2018, Ripple’s XRP sales increased by about one percent. In Q1 2018, Ripple reported total XRP sales of $167.7 million.

Of the $169 million recorded in Q1, Ripple sold $61.93 million in XRP to institutional buyers and the remaining $107.49 million via third-party market makers. In total, Q1 2019 performance constitutes a return to the trend of increasing quarterly sales that took a dip in the last quarter of 2018.

In other news, Binance Research indicates that XRP is an excellent diversifier for investors looking to hold positions in multiple top-tier cryptocurrencies. According to a recently published report, Binance Research concluded that cryptos with a market capitalization above $3 billion tend to form price clusters.

Cryptocurrencies in the same clusters tend to have similar price trends. The report highlighted that bitcoin and ether belong to the same cluster. However, researchers at Binance reported that XRP offers a healthy dose of diversity among all the major cryptocurrencies.

Published at Thu, 02 May 2019 11:00:13 +0000