A new report from Messari shows XRP is the worst performing crypto asset in the first quarter of 2020 among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies – sans Bitcoin.
BTC, the leading cryptocurrency by market cap, began the year at $7,236 and ended the first quarter at $6,384, an 11.77% decrease. XRP began 2020 at $0.1939 and ended the quarter at $0.1740, a 10.26% decrease.
XRP’s pullback comes as Ripple forges new partnerships designed to leverage the third-largest cryptocurrency through the company’s liquidity solution, dubbed On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), Messari notes. Mexico’s top Bitcoin exchange Bitso says it’s using XRP as a bridge currency to power 2.5% of all remittances between the US and Mexico.
Messari also highlights Ripple’s strategy of easing XRP sales, which started in the second half of 2019.
While Ripple has long stated that its sales of the crypto asset are too minuscule to influence its price and are relatively small compared to the daily volume of XRP, the company has dramatically scaled back on its routine programmatic sales. It sold zero XRP in the fourth quarter of 2019 on cryptocurrency exchanges while also decreasing sales to institutions over-the-counter. According to researchers at Messari, the reduced sales are having very little impact on the price of XRP.
In addition, Messari comments on Ripple’s securities lawsuit, which is expected to “march on for the foreseeable future.” Lead plaintiff and former XRP investor Bradley Sostack claims that Ripple illegally sold XRP as an unregistered security and breached US securities law. In February, a federal judge denied Ripple’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
