Investors were bored when Ripple continued to unlock 1 billion XRP despite all criticisms

By Emma 01/1/20 9:09 AM

The value of XRP has dropped 98% from its highest level in 2018. This makes the community very unhappy. The main reason is attributed to Ripple’s token selling pressure.

Ripple’s XRP is not valuable

Initial Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd compared Ripple’s regular XRP sales with tokens sold through ICOs and concluded that XRP is not valuable.

This.

XRP, like almost all ICO coins, doesn’t need to exist and gives you no real rights to anything.

It’s purpose is to make Ripple money, by selling it to suckers. https://t.co/kif8JXfPfV

— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) December 21, 2019

However, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz refuted the view that XRP sales are similar to ICOs. According to him, the sales of XRP, in the beginning, was “negligible.”

Nobody buys XRP to give Ripple money to do things. We were vc/angel funded and were going to build regardless. We started selling XRP only after there was a market price and for negligible amounts compared to our other funding.

— David Schwartz (@JoelKatz) December 29, 2019

Ripple owns more than half of the approximately 100 billion XRP that exists, having locked 55 billion tokens in escrow at the end of 2017. The company has set a schedule of issuing 1 billion XRP at the beginning of each month to sell to third parties.

By the end of the month, Ripple took any part of a billion XRP that it did not sell and locked it into collateral. This reflects the policy that Ripple has stated that they will never sell all their holdings at once.

Ripple unlocked 1 billion XRP

Despite trying to justify selling XRP, Ripple still periodically opens 1 billion XRP every month.
And the first month of 2020 is no exception. As soon as 2019 closed, Ripple unlocked 1 billion XRP ($ 192 million) from its escrow wallet.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 1,000,000,000 #XRP (192,008,043 USD) unlocked from escrow at Ripple Escrow wallet

Tx: https://t.co/ifOGHFVSbD

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 1, 2020

It seems that users are out of patience with Ripple. Many people have frankly called XRP a shitcoin, and some have even called Ripple scam / Ponzi.

Source: Twitter

Many people congratulate the XRP army and also criticize Ripple for continuing to dump the price of XRP.

Happy New Year $XRP bagholders…one more dump before we close 2019… ?? pic.twitter.com/eTijYZFY6e

— kryptoshi4ever (@kryptoshi4ever) January 1, 2020

Before Whale Alert reported on Ripple unlocking 1 billion XRP, there were three large transfers of XRP. A total of 481.8M XRP (~ $ 91.9 million) were transferred.

There are two large transactions (more than 455M XRP) transferred to and from Ripple’s wallet, and a smaller one (only about 26M XRP) was moved from an unknown wallet to Bitstamp, presumably a whale selling holdings.

Source: Twitter

Ripple sold a total of $ 66.24 million of XRP to cryptocurrency exchanges and institutions in Q3 2019. In Q2, the company sold XRP worth $ 251.51 million.

The company said it has stopped selling XRP to exchanges in the middle of Q3, instead of focusing entirely on selling XRP OTC to some strategic partners. At present, Ripple’s Q4 report has not been released. Therefore, it is unclear whether, in Q4 2019, Ripple will continue to sell on exchanges, and does it plan to sell XRP on the open market by 2020?