The blockchain payments firm Ripple Labs has reported the lowest ever sale of its native cryptocurrency XRP in the Quarter 1 of 2020. There have been 87% drop in sales of XRP during the first quarter of 2020, as compared to the previous quarter. Ripple announced on Thursday that it sold a total of $1.75 million worth of XRP in Q1 of this year, as compared to $13.08 million in Q4 of 2019.
The decline is the result of Ripple’s pause in XRP sales to exchanges.
The sharp decline in the sale of XRP is the result of a drop in direct institutional sales, as well as a continued pause in Ripple’s programmatic sales, i.e., XRP sales to cryptocurrency exchanges. The blockchain payment firm said it solely focused on the over-the-counter (OTC) channel for XRP sales in strategic regions, including Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and Asia. XRP sales had continued to fall since Q3 2019 when it paused programmatic sales of cryptocurrency to exchanges. In the last quarter of 2019, the total XRP sale declined by 80%.
Programmatic sales account for the majority of XRP’s sales volumes.
Until the second quarter of 2019, programmatic sales accounted for the majority of Ripple’s sales volumes. But the blockchain payment firm decided to part away with these programmatic sales because of reports of inflated volumes. Ripple earlier this year had said that it would continue to evaluate its benchmarks challenges, such as fake volume, that continue to remain in the industry. Ripple’s sale of XRP in the quarter of this year has been the lowest since it started to report these numbers back in quarter 4th of 2016.
Meanwhile, the price of XRP fell slightly nearly 9% from the first quarter to $0.1763, as compared to $0.1928 in the previous quarter. Ripple, in its quarterly report, informed that from Q4 2019 to Q1 2020, RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity service had tripled in transaction volume, and the dollar value transacted increased by more than 294%.
