Ripple sells $251M in XRP in Q2 but wants to take "more conservative approach" in Q3

Ripple, the developer and issuer of XRP, revealed that it has sold $251.51 million in XRP in the second quarter of this year.

As per its report, the total sales of the company, which is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, surged by almost 48% compared with its performance during the first quarter at just $169.42 million.

The spike was driven by institutional direct sales, which saw an increase of nearly 73% to $109.7 million from only $61.9 million in the previous quarter. However, the majority of the sales volumes were still from programmatic sales at $144.6 million, up from $107 million in the first quarter.

But despite the growth, Ripple is planning to “take a more conservative approach” in the third quarter. The company switched benchmarks to CryptoCompare’s Top Tier (CCTT) and said that it will target programmatic sales at 10 basis points of CCTT reported volumes in the next quarter. It also wants to scale back from some over-the-counter exchange markets and shift to where liquidity is most needed, a move that will likely negatively impact institutional sales.

"Going forward, Ripple plans to focus institutional sales on markets where the on-exchange liquidity for XRP is insufficient to meet institutional demand," it said.

The report also included the escrow activity of XRP for the latest quarter. The firm revealed it withdrew 1 billion from escrow each month over the quarter, totaling to 3 billion XRP. Of which, 2.1 billion were said to be reinvested into escrow contracts, while the remaining 0.9 billion were used to finance XRP developments via its incubators Xpring and RippleNet.

The report also noted that the average daily XRP volume increased to $429.51 million in the second quarter compared with $156.01 million in Q1. The native currency also experienced a price increase of nearly 25% per quarter at $0.40 and listed on 12 new exchanges, making XRP available to more than 130 exchanges worldwide.

As previously reported, Xpring has spent $500 million in more than 20 firms in the blockchain space to build an XRP-focused ecosystem. The investment reportedly funded various firms, ranging from independent developers to large-scale partnerships since its May 2018 launch.

The blockchain startup also recently opened a new office in Brazil, which allows banks, payment providers, and corporates to use blockchain to conduct instant payments into-and-out of the country.