One oft-critiqued aspect of XRP is its close ties to the FinTech company Ripple – an entity that holds a significant amount of XRP. Despite this, the company is also a driving force behind the utility and adoption of the cryptocurrency, which has led many investors to believe that its close ties to Ripple is a net-positive.
Regardless of this, many investors have been concerned that the massive amount of XRP sold by the company each quarter could depress the markets and temper any positive price action that would otherwise be incurred by the cryptocurrency.
Ripple Sells $251.51 Worth of XRP in Q2
According to Ripple’s Q2 2019 XRP Markets Report, the company sold a whopping $251.51 million worth of XRP in the past several months, which marks a significant increase from its Q1 sales that totaled at $169.42 million worth of XRP.
According to the breakdown of sales in the report, $144.64 million worth of XRP was sold this quarter via their programmatic sales, which are “done with the goal of minimizing market impact” by selling a small percentage of the cryptocurrency’s overall trading volume.
The remaining $106.87 million worth of XRP was sold via institutional direct sales, which details the amount of the cryptocurrency that is sold through the company’s XRP II licensed subsidiary, which offers large buyers/sellers a simple way to access the cryptocurrency without having to purchase it from exchanges.
XRP Sales Expected to Dive as Inflated Volumes Impact Programmatic Sales
The key highlight of the Q2 markets report is that the company will be selling a significantly lower amount of XRP through their programmatic sales in the future, as the volume numbers that they have previously been selling based off of are now known to be highly inflated.
Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, spoke about this in a recent tweet, saying:
“In this nascent industry, we need to be transparent and urge others to do the same. As a responsible stakeholder of XRP, Ripple is confronting this issue by updating the benchmark for market volume and reducing future sales of XRP.”
Furthermore, the report notes that “Ripple plans to take a more conservative approach to XRP sales in Q3,” referencing the fact that they had previously been making sales based off of highly inflated volume data.
Although XRP is closely tracking the aggregated crypto markets, the new volume guidance being used by Ripple will mean that less XRP is sold into the markets from Ripple each quarter, which could mean that its price will have slightly more room to run in the months ahead.
