Although XRP seems to be heavily undercapitalized, Ripple the business is staying the course, and the sales of massive chunks of XRP continue despite the rage of some HODLers.
Just a few hours ago, Ripple released 500M more XRP out of escrow. The transaction occurred at 04:45:10 UTC and is part of the company’s normal process of selling XRP to stay afloat.
Ripple has triggered the annoyance of many XRP investors who believe that excessive liquidity injections cause downward price pressure. To put it in simpler terms: they think XRP sales benefit Ripple and harm investors.
Recently, a current Twitter user and ex-proud member of the XRP Army, CryptoBitlord, became one of this group’s visible faces after launching a campaign against Ripple, asking the company to stop “dumping billions of XRP”.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse later defended himself and his company, clarifying in a series of tweets that each sale was scheduled and verifiable. However, this was not enough for CryptoBitlord, who threatened to fork XRP and create a new token based on Ripple’s technology but maintained by the community.
Although a contentious hard fork or chain split generally harms the price of a cryptocurrency (the market is divided between those adopting one chain or another), Ripple did not comment on CryptoBitlord’s threats, leaving this Twitter war to the XRP Army.
However, the recent move is a demonstration of Ripple’s power. Threats do not affect it, and despite the low price of its token, the company will cash in over $130M after the sales.
Ripple’s actions can be viewed from two perspectives. On one hand, XRP has more verifiable corporate users than most tokens. Each of these partnerships is the result of hours of travel, negotiations, and expensive bureaucratic processes — which Ripple pays for with the money obtained from such “dumps”.
However, it is also undeniable that the value of XRP is plummeting, affecting the entire community of investors who believed in the profitability of this token. As noted by Bloomberg, it is the only top-ten cryptocurrency to have declined in 2019.
And although Ripple repeatedly says they don’t care much about the price of XRP, the community seems to be reaching a point where that is all they care about.
This article was first published on Sep 3, 2019.