$XRP
📉 Ripple is flush with cash 📉
So Circle fits Ripple from a product positioning perspective, plus Ripple is flush with cash. It is still the largest holder of the XRP cryptocurrency, which has more than quadrupled in price since the US elections, despite having dropped a third from its January peak. Today XRP is valued at $2.22 or $130 billion in total. At the end of last year Ripple held 4.5 billion in XRP tokens outright, plus 38 billion tokens locked up in escrow. The outright XRP holdings are equivalent to $10 billion. However, it recently committed $1.25 billion to acquire prime broker Hidden Road, an active player in the FX markets.
If Ripple offloaded its 4.5 billion XRP over a short period, theoretically that should suppress the XRP price. That said, the XRP price is more driven by speculation than other cryptocurrencies, so it could go either way.
Why is the XRP price described as speculative? Because the current market capitalization of XRP is around 58% of Ethereum’s. If you use the fully diluted figure (including Ripple’s escrowed tokens), the total value of all XRP and Ethereum tokens are the same. Yet Ethereum’s daily active addresses are around 465,000, or twenty times more than the roughly 23,000 for XRP. That’s without considering the vastly different numbers of Ethereum developers and every other metric.
So for Ripple, it’s a great time to spend XRP. But any acquisition target that has to hold on to XRP for any period of time might worry about the sustainability of the token’s price.