Ripple Snatches A Bigger Slice Of The Cryptocurrency Market

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Ripple is making up ground on other leading digital currencies with an increased market share, according to a new trading report.

Ripple has grown to take a 7.57% share of the digital currency space – up from 3.56% at the end of 2017.

The progress was revealed in a market report for the first quarter of 2018.

Developers Opencoin say the growth is attributed to listing on 18 more exchanges during the trading period – taking availability up to 60 exchanges worldwide.

The data reveals XRP worth $160 billion was traded in the first three months of the year. XRP is the digital currency associated with ripple, which is an open payment network that operates with the currency. Together, the cryptocurrency is called XRP Ripple or ripple for short.

Price wobble

The report adds that 3 billion XRP tokens were freed from a cryptographically sealed escrow. Of that, 2.7 billion went to new escrow accounts, while the remainder was reinvested in the network.

The total capitalisation of XRP Ripple’s digital assets comes to $263 billion – a 56% drop from $603 billion at the start of the year.

XRP started the year with a price of $1.91 but slipped 73% to $0.51 cents at the end of the quarter.

The report points out that the cryptocurrency market went south during the quarter, with ripple following the trend.

Developers also cited a move by conmarketcap.com, a listing web site, to drop South Korean exchanges impacted XRP Ripple badly as the digital currency has a large slice of the market in that country.

What is XRP Ripple?

During the quarter, ripple announced tie-ups with Western Union, Moneygram, Cambridge Global Payments, MercuryFX and IDT.

The current price has seen ripple recover to $0.80 cents with a market cap of $30.66 billion.

Ripple owner Opencoin is developing the system as an open source money transfer network outside the ‘walled garden’ of formal financial institutions that restrict access with fees, processing delays and currency charges.

The network is designed to transfer any currency – including bitcoin, US dollars, pounds or Japanese yen.

Like bitcoin, ripple has a cap on the number of tokens that can be mined.