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San Francisco based Ripple has been quietly working away with a focus on expanding its network of partners and increasing the usage and adoption of its native token, XRP. The latest initiative is a RippleNet accelerator program that offers financial incentives to institutions that help promote the Ripple payments system.
The fintech firm has taken $300 million in XRP from its own holdings to fund the accelerator program. According to the company blog the program consists of a ‘Volume Rebate and an Adoption Marketing Incentive’.
The volume rebate is an incentive that offers XRP rebates to RippleNet members which have reached certain milestones in terms of processed transaction volume. The announcement goes on to add that the reimbursements can cover anywhere between 50 to 300 percent of the integration fees and first year’s license fees. It can be taken in XRP or USD but resale of tokens will be restricted to ‘support healthy XRP markets’.
The second part of the initiative is an adoption market incentive which rewards members that promote Ripple services to other companies. RippleNet members will be given marketing tools and materials to help expand the ecosystem. Vice president of marketing at Ripple, Monica Long, likened the initiative to the early days of PayPal;
“We’re borrowing a page from the likes of PayPal (with their early days adoption and referral bonuses), implementing incentives to accelerate network effects on RippleNet. Since we’re offering the incentives in XRP, we anticipate seeing an added benefit of building an easy on-ramp for institutions to use XRP in their payment flows to lower liquidity cost in the future. Early reception of these XRP incentives in a test phase has been very positive.”
$535 Million XRP Sold in 2018, Market Cap Claim Questioned
According to a separate report, Ripple sold $535.5 million XRP in 2018 with $129 million in Q4. Breaking that down the report added that $40 million was sold to institutional investors in Q4 while $89 million was sold via third parties such as crypto exchanges. The institutional portion was less than half of the volume sold for the same quarter the previous year.
Recently an analytics firm questioned Ripple’s market capitalization claim alleging that it could be inflated. The firm claims that Ripple market cap could be over by $6 billion which would effectively half the current stated figure of $12.5 billion according to Coinmarketcap. At the time of writing XRP was trading down 4% on the day at $0.30.
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