This means Ripple sold XRP’s worth $169.42 million in Q1 2019. Even as the $169.42 million figure symbolizes a 31% increase over $129.03 million in Q4 2018, Ripple’s institutional direct sales numbers have seen an even larger increase.
The firm posted $61.93 million in direct institutional sales this quarter—up more than 54% from $40.15 million in Q4 2018. XRP’s programmatic sales for the quarter were $107.49 million, up nearly 21% from last quarter’s $88.88 million. Overall, Ripple’s XRP sales represented 0.32% of overall XRP trading volume in Q1 2019—up from 0.24% in Q4 2018.
The San Francisco-based company reports that it disbursed 3 billion XRP (1 billion per month) during the quarter for Ripple’s Q1 escrow operation. Nevertheless, 2.3 billion XRP were sent back to new escrow agreements during the same period.
The leftover 700 million XRP is being used in various ways to improve the Ripple ecosystem, the report notes. Furthermore, year-on-year numbers did not show any considerable development in XRP sales. In Q1 2018, Ripple sold $167.7 million worth XRP, representing only 1.03% less than this year’s Q1. The document further outlines that XRP’s fluctuation of everyday return in Q1 2019 was 2.9%, rendering Q1 the second-lowest volatility quarter since Q4 2013.
Regarding XRP’s rolling volatility of 30-day returns, the study describes that it has declined significantly over the quarter, finally falling to its supposedly lowest points since Q3 2016. But not everything is great for Ripple. XRP’s total quantity traded worldwide fell by roughly 2% to $53.85 billion in Q1 relative to $54.82 billion in Q4 2018. January to March 2019 also represents the second quarter with minimum volatility since Q4 2013 for XRP. Ripple further added, “rolling volatility of 30-day returns declined steadily throughout the quarter.”
The average daily volume of XRP was $595.28 million, stable when comparison with Q4 2018 levels, even as the price of XRP decreased, reports. In addition, continuous 30-day correlation with other major assets like bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) managed to stay relatively high all through Q1 2019. In other XRP news, Ripple disclosed that 19 more crypto exchanges started listing the asset in Q1 2019, taking the tally of XRP exchanges worldwide to about 120.
Ripple also claims that at the beginning of the new quarter, its global payment network, RippleNet, exceeded 200 clients and announced the participation of 13 more financial firms. New banks adopting RippleNet in Q1 2019 included India’s Federal Bank and Oman’s second-largest market-value bank, BankDhofar. When clients of RippleNet exceeded 200 in January, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, argued that fiat volatility threat during weekend market shutdowns contributed to the success of the network.