The digital currency XRP and the Ripple project have always been a controversial topic among cryptocurrency supporters. Lots of people love and advocate for XRP, while others believe the network is pure garbage.
According to the project’s creators, the Ripple network is a real-time gross settlement system that has a native token called XRP. The project was launched in 2012 and XRP is one of the oldest digital currencies in comparison to networks like BTC.
Crypto traders and speculators have been discussing the digital currency XRP (ripple) lately because the price has been stagnant compared to other digital assets. Some venture capitalists and analysts plan to short XRP, while other speculators believe the crypto is poised for a price jump in the future.
Additionally, crypto enthusiasts have been discussing Ripple cofounder Jed McCaleb selling 1 billion XRP.
A Closer Look at XRP
XRP market cap is represented by the color purple and is the third largest cryptocurrency market valuation today.
Our newsdesk decided to look at data points to see how the digital asset weighs up against BTC’s market and network performance. News.Bitcoin.com analyzed data from onchain, the economics, development and the XRP project’s prominence on social media. Further, we took a look at today’s opinions from crypto influencers and analysts speculating on XRP digital currency markets and the network’s performance. Long ago, XRP was called “ripple” but most people refer to the cryptocurrency these days as simply XRP. When the digital currency was launched, developers created 100 billion units but at press time there’s less than half that number in circulation (43.6 billion).
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XRP is trading for $0.27 per coin today and there’s 43,698,224,662 XRP in circulation. Tallying up each coin’s worth plus the number of XRP in circulation makes XRP the third largest blockchain by market capitalization. According to Messari.io, XRP’s trade volume this week was between $325-660 million per day, but the data site claims “real volume” during the last 24 hours is around $121 million. XRP is down 92% from its $3.84 per unit all-time high (ATH). During the last year against USD, the currency is down 11% and against BTC, XRP is down 66% over the same timeframe. As far as volume by currency is concerned, Cryptocompare indicates that tether (USDT) is the top coin swapped with XRP, capturing 46% of all trades. This is followed by BTC (17.68%), USD (8.77%), KRW (6.96%), ETH (3.60%), JPY (3.08%), and EUR (1.80%).
XRP price on February 10, 2020.
Crypto Analysts and Traders Wonder if XRP Prices Will Spike or Remain Stagnant
Some traders believe XRP is poised for a spike in value, while other analysts think people should avoid XRP like the plague. For instance, a recent article from Forbes discussing the cofounders of Multicoin Capital is titled: “Avoid XRP Says Multicoin; Bitcoin’s Big Rally.” Within the editorial, it notes that Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain have been shorting XRP. Venture capitalist and Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz discussed XRP “underperforming” in a series of tweets on February 6.
“XRP and many other cryptos, like ETH are still in the ‘proving’ phase. They aren’t going to succeed as solely a store of value as BTC has taken that lane”, Novogratz tweeted last Tuesday.
$XRP – Once in a while you gotta stop and look around…. you could miss it
Spring it!
– TraderXO (@TraderX0X0) February 1, 2020
Meanwhile, a recently published report by Steve Muchoki tells a different story and says that the “XRP price can reach $0.60 in the near future as XRP’s popularity is growing.” “Ripple’s XRP price is showing all the signs of reaching $0.60 in the near future, as it is supported by different technical and fundamental aspects”, Muchoki wrote on Monday. The article mentioned a recent Twitter poll about which altcoins will last the test of time and XRP came out winning. The writer also detailed that Ripple might go public in 2020 with an initial public offering and highlighted that “the total supply is double the circulating supply.” Despite Muchoki’s opinion, many crypto market observers have noticed Ripple cofounder Jed McCaleb has allegedly sold a good portion of his XRP holdings.
McCaleb Sells a Billion XRP
A report written by blockchain analytics provider Whale Alert estimates that McCaleb has sold a lot of XRP since 2014. Whale Alert notes that McCaleb acquired roughly 9 billion XRP since Ripple’s founding days and in September 2019 Whale Alert reported on the transfer of 100 million XRP from Ripple to McCaleb’s wallet. The blockchain analytics researchers managed to find around 8 billion of McCaleb’s alleged stash of XRP.
“In total, we managed to track the sales of 1.05 billion XRP (almost exclusively through Bitstamp) between 2014 and 2019”, Whale Alert’s report highlights. “At an average sale price of 0.129 cents per XRP, the total sale amount was $135 million USD.”
As far as transactions per day are concerned, XRP has been outpacing BTC in that department. Coin Metrics shows that BTC averages around 300,000 transactions (txns) every 24 hours, but XRP is pushing 800,000 to 900,000 txns a day and has recently seen upwards of 2 million per day.
XRP vs. BTC transactions per day according to Coin Metrics data. BTC is the red line and XRP is depicted in the chart as black.
XRP has around 209,000 Reddit subscribers and 945,000 Twitter followers, giving the coin a 21% social benchmark according to Coindesk crypto data. As far as development, XRP has 482 Github watchers and 81 Github contributors which is significantly smaller than other coin contributor counts. The XRP codebase has been forked over 1,000 times but the most prominent fork is the Stellar (XLM) network. As far as merged pull requests on Github are concerned, XRP has seen over 2,400 while BTC merged pull requests stand at 12,200.
XRP’s developer index and benchmark data.
XRP Still Faces a Number of Unknowns
XRP believers think Ripple’s partnerships with financial incumbents will help XRP succeed. And XRP proponents also wholeheartedly believe XRP will dominate other cryptos like BTC in the future and help decentralize fiat settlement and remittances worldwide. At the same time, a number of crypto enthusiasts think XRP is very centralized and the number of coins held by early investors and founders is scary. Others believe XRP is also an unregistered security and the crypto could have more issues with government regulators about this concern.
In 2018, a group of XRP investors filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs Inc., and the class action lawsuit claims the firm sold XRP to them and others knowing the digital asset might be considered an unregistered security.
Crypto advocates have been concerned because regulators like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could retroactively penalize the project’s creators. Despite these fears, most XRP supporters still think that XRP will continue to remain one of the top digital assets as far as valuation and performance are concerned. So far XRP has remained a silent behemoth, consistently occupying a top three spot by market cap, despite concerted attempts to dislodge it.
