The most contentious debate in crypto is about Ripple, XRP and their connection. Ripple is vehemently claiming they are not creators of XRP tokens but they do have 55 billion of them in their ownership with a right to sell them in a pre-defined process – 1 billion tokens per month. And they religiously follow that process every month, with some change pouring back into the escrow to be sold sometime later, probably when the XRP price is higher.
Ripple Inc sold $535.56 million worth of XRP in 2018, according its quarterly report for Q4 2018 released on Jan. 24.
The report further notes that the sales of XRP tokens in Q4 2018 amounted to $129.03 million worth, which is equivalent to 0.24 percent of global XRP volume. The Q4 average XRP daily volume was reportedly equivalent to $585.7 million and is the highest since the first quarter of the year.
During Q4 3 billion XRP was reportedly released out of cryptographic escrow while 2.4 billion were returned.
Where does the money go?
According to the statement, the remaining 600 million XRP not returned to escrow are being used “in a variety of ways to help support the XRP ecosystem, including the RippleNet Accelerator Program and Xpring investments like Securitize.”
While you are here, have a look at our Ripple [XRP] price prediction for 2020.
Even the hardcore XRP holders started wondering where does that mountain of money go. The duty defenders of Ripple try to defend it, like this Reddit user:
“So much money? Look at reports. it ALL goes to developing the ecosystem. You can verify it all publicly that it moved, and further verify a great deal of how it was used. From blockchain research, rippleworks( helping the developing world), xrpring( 100 projects building on the xrp ledger), the accelerator program, etc. This is all stated in the market reports, the movements are backed up by the ledger, and you can further verify by looking at round investment reports(inside and outside of xpring initiatives), reports from non profits and charities(balance sheets, public statements) etc”
However, there is a lot vague fluff and marketing jargon in those statements, which got called out:
“The reports have one sentence saying they use the money for developing XRP. We can’t verify publicly anything because Ripple isn’t a public company. But there is an article from the end of 2016 that says they aim to bring the total of employees to 175, which is pretty low for $500m. Maybe they doubled it in 2 years.
There is also very little info on Xpring, just two articles mentioning 5 projects.
Look now, the RippleNet Accelerator Program can take a lot of money if it’s super successful. I can only hope for that. If that accounts for most of the extra $450m in 2018… that’s customer rebates for integration costs, it should mean a lot of new customers on the RippleNet.”
The most probable answer to this question is: paying their employees, execs and supporting their high standard of life. Nothing wrong with that but one would wonder how do most of those XRP holders live as they are essentially those who pay for all of that? Is it not enough to pay taxes and finance corrupt governments, do people need more overlords and masters to serve? Apparently yes.
