In the midst of all the attention over Ripple’s work helping banks make cross-border money transfers less expensive and more efficient, Ripple has released the first of its quarterly XRP Market Reports. The reports are designed to “improve the health of XRP markets globally” according to a statement and will feature “sales, commentary on price movement, and news of newly-available third party wallets, exchanges, validators, and liquidity providers.
“XRP is core to Ripple’s strategy,” the statement at the Ripple website read, “and the time is right for us to feature XRP more prominently.” The highlights include news that market participants bought $4.6 million of XRP directly from Ripple’s money service business, XRP II. And that XRP enjoyed a quarter-over-quarter average daily volume growth of 121%.
With regard to price action in XRP, the report cited a number of factors including the uncertainty of the U.S. presidential election, India’s move to limit its cash economy, and growing demand from China as key drivers. And while XRP slightly underperformed other digital currencies toward the end of 2016, the report attributes this to both availability issues on digital exchanges and in China, as well as “XRP’s reputation as a more institutional asset” as opposed to a speculative trading instrument.
The report also noted that one of the biggest digital asset exchanges in the world, Bitstamp, has begun listing XRP/EUR and XRP/USD trading pairs, and that Ripple will launch a plan to enable “qualified market participants” to borrow XRP. This was described as “a crucial step” toward bringing XRP into the capital markets industry en route to becoming “the institutional standard bearer for international value transfer.”
Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2012 (as OpenCoin), Ripple demonstrated its distributed ledger technology at FinovateSpring 2013. Recent headlines for Ripple include the company’s work with India’s Axis Bank, which will use Ripple technology for cross-border payments, and the addition of a number of new members of its global network in September. The company appointed a new CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, in November, who had previous served Ripple as COO. Of the top 50 banks in the world, 15 work with Ripple, and there are nine countries with banks currently implementing Ripple technology. The company has raised more than $93 million in total funding, and includes SBI Investment, Santander InnoVentures, IDG Capital Partners, and Core Innovation Capital among its investors.