Ripple’s XRP Sales Sink to New Lows 

Ripple Labs is coasting off what is considered to be its biggest year yet. However, the company’s good fortunes haven’t particularly spilled over to XRP.

XRP is currently the third-largest digital asset in the crypto industry, lagging behind only Bitcoin and Ether. However, as a blog post published on Wednesday revealed, Ripple hasn’t particularly been able to do much of selling the asset. The post revealed that total XRP sales from Ripple Labs amounted to just $13.08 million throughout last year’s fourth quarter, an almost 80 percent drop from the $66.24 million it sold in Q3 2019. 

A Stop in Programmatic Sales

Of course, this drop in sales isn’t entirely surprising. The asset struggled for the entirety of 2019, eventually ending the year worse off than it started. Ripple began 2019 trading at $0.35 per token- pretty understandable, considering the crypto winter of 2018. However, while Bitcoin and a few other digital assets were able to pick up in value as the year went on, XRP continued to sputter, and it eventually ended 2019 trading at $0.19.

All through this time, quarterly sales of XRP were consistently dropping as well. However, these drops were also expected, as Ripple Labs halted the programmatic sales in mid-2019. At the time, the firm did claim that it expected there to be a significant drop in sales.

 “In the short term, this means Ripple’s sales of XRP in Q2 2019 will be substantively lower (as a percentage of reported volume) than in the previous quarter—with our stated target of 20bps for programmatic sales of XRP volume, as reported by CoinMarketCap, likely dropping to less than 10bps.”

The programmatic sales had accounted to almost 60 percent of XRP sales in Q2- bringing in $144 million out of total $251 million in sales. So, it’s expected that shutting this down would lead to a drop. However, whether or not it anticipated such a drop is still to be seen. 

Ripple Labs is still Dandy 

Regardless, it’s obvious that XRP isn’t entirely what the entire Ripple ecosystem was based on, because while sales of XRP tokens declined, Ripple was still able to record a stellar year. The firm has been able to grow significantly through several alliances and partnerships- including and especially its partnership with global payment processor MoneyGram, a firm in which Ripple now owns 10 percent. 

In December, the company announced that it had completed its Series C funding round, in which it raised $200 million from Tetragon, Route 66, SBI Holdings, and other participants. The funding haul effectively brought the company to a $10 billion valuation. 

“We are in a strong financial position to execute against our vision. As others in the blockchain space have slowed their growth or even shut down, we have accelerated our momentum and industry leadership throughout 2019,” company chief executive Brad Garlinghouse said in a blog post at the time.

Now, the company is looking towards the future, as Garlinghouse hinted at the World Economic Forum earlier this week that the company could be filing for an initial Public Offering (IPO) later this year.