Ripple announced, in its Q4 report, a growth of 550% by its on-demand liquidity [ODL] platform between the last two quarters of 2019. Ripple’s USP was also brought to light when the Secretary of the US Treasury, Steve Mnuchin spoke about the benefits of cross-borders systems at the 2020 World Economic Forum.
Following the positive statement from the Secretary, Ripple stated that its global network, RippleNet, contributed to driving the usage of XRP. It added in a blog post:
“Banks and payment providers are joining RippleNet to leverage liquidity on-demand for cross-border payments, as an alternative to traditional pre-funding and improving processing efficiency.”
Ripple’s ODL performed well in Latin America, with MoneyGram recently revealing the movement of more than 10% of payment transactions between U.S. and Mexico. Even though trading digital assets has been considered a speculator’s market, Ripple noted that the market shifted its outlook last year with major players like JP Morgan and Fidelity entering the field. It added:
“These new institutional entrances, specifically for hedging instruments such as futures/derivatives, plays a big role bringing new investors into the space, thereby further stabilizing markets. In the past year, derivatives trading in digital assets recorded clear growth. “
Ripple expected traditional investors to see greater opportunities to trade digital assets with the growth of hedging products- reducing risks and generating higher trading volumes. Ripple’s effort to engage the traditional financing sector with the crypto space was visible, as it saw growth potential in the sector of lending and borrowing of digital assets and stated that it was now a $5 billion industry.
Despite the growth of its various platforms and the crypto space, on the whole, XRP’s price has remained low. The ODL platform has been proactively processing payments, even though with less volume, but that has not impacted the XRP market. The coin was valued at $0.2406, at press time, with a market cap of $10.51 billion. However, Ripple hinted at exponential growth in the long term:
“XRP has boasted tremendous growth as a global payment asset in the last year or two, as elaborated above in this article. However, the growth potential of transformational technologies tends to unfold exponentially. Therefore, the markets tend to overestimate the impact in the short term, but underestimate it in the long run.”
