Ripple recently released its Q1 2020 XRP Markets Report and a different set of developments with respect to XRP’s market were observed in the first three months of 2020 as compared with previous quarter reports.
During the Black Thursday event, when the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems were struggling with network and performance issues, eventually leading to an increase in transaction fees, XRPL remained stable. The company reported that the performance of XRP Ledger, such as transaction pricing and speed, remained stable.
RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL)
One of the major expansions in 2019 was the ODL of RippleNet and the quarterly update indicated that the transaction volume of ODL service had improved by 294 per cent in terms of the dollar value traded in the industry.
Taking the example of Ripple and Azimo, a digital money transfer service based in the United Kingdom, the report indicated,
“Azimo launched its service to send payments to the Philippines and, within a few months, ODL saved the company 30%-50% when arranging currency transfers between customers in the Philippines and those in the UK and Europe.”
XRP Sales, Reported Volume and Volatility
In the past, Ripple has often been criticized for facilitating the sale of XRP in large amounts to maintain its balance sheet. This time around, it was observed that Ripple had significantly reduced XRP sales and also maintained a hard cap on programmatic sales.
XRP’s total sales in Q1 2020 amounted to just $1.75 million, while XRP’s sales in Q4 2019 amounted to $13.08 million. The organization kept its focus entirely on OTC sales to develop XRP’s utility and liquidity in strategic regions, including the Asia Pacific region and EMEA.
In addition, the reported daily volume for the third-largest token also increased from $187.34 million in Q4 2019 to $322.66 million in Q1 2020 and remained relatively high above the reported average of $198.10 million in 2019.
However, in Q1 2020, the volatility of regular returns for XRP was incredibly high, with a 6.2 percent jump from Q4 2019 low of 3.1 percent. Interestingly, the volatility of XRP over the quarter was higher than that of BTC (5.8 per cent) and lower than that of ETH (7.3 per cent).
On the downside, however, even after showing signs of decoupling from large-capital digital assets, XRP’s correlations with other large-capitalization digital assets spike to 100 percent after Black Thursday’s Market Meltdown. It should be reduced in the long run but at the moment the demand remains strongly correlated with the digital asset collective industry.