In the past few days, the highly active tranches out of the Ripple wallet were interpreted as attempts to sell some of the XRP held in the company’s treasury. Ripple locked up 55 billion XRP, with the right to unlock and sell up to 1 billion coins each month. The community around the project saw this as a betrayal, potentially depressing the XRP market price.
“Ripple continue dumping billions of XRP on us, crashing the price!
It’s amazing this sort of behavior is widely accepted in the crypto world. Sure we know that XRP is a solid coin with major potential but this needs to stop!” stated the petition presented by the community.
Ripple uses some of the coins for direct donations, to popularize the asset and its network that aims to compete with banks’ SWIFT network. However, the selling pressure is seen as a threat to the asset’s price, especially combined with the smaller sales coming from Jed McCaleb, one of Ripple’s early co-founders and founder of Stellar (XLM).
Over the years, XRP has gone through cycles of extreme hype and skepticism. The asset was seen as potentially displacing Bitcoin (BTC) and taking over worldwide money transfers, thus commanding a much higher market price based on the network’s value. But adoption has lagged, and most XRP transfers are either experimental or for trading purposes.
XRP currently trades around $0.26, stagnant at the same level, without a significant price move in the past months. The asset has lagged for a long time at rather depressed prices, with no hope of ever returning to the peak of $3.23 reached at the end of 2017. In 2019, XRP has achieved a net decline, despite the mid-year brief peak above $0.46. The asset has declined about 23% so far, unlike other leading altcoins that posted gains.
