Expert Says Ripple Not at Fault That XRP Only Grew 20% In 5 Years

Legal expert Bill Morgan has countered the view that Ripple’s monthly escrow XRP release contributed to XRP’s underwhelming price performance in the last five years. The recent conversation around XRP’s five-year-long poor performance erupted after a crypto enthusiast posted a comparison of XRP’s 2018 price with other prominent competing crypto projects.

Per the image, as confirmed by data from authoritative sources like CoinMarketCap, XRP traded around $0.5 in November 2018. With XRP’s price around $0.6021 today, it implies the digital asset has grown by only 20% all through the last five years.

On the other hand, rival digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Cardano (ADA) have seen no fewer than 400% gains through the same period. Specifically, BTC sold around $6,420 in November 2018 but now trades above $37,700, marking a 487% gain. Similarly, ETH and ADA, which sold at $210 and $0.075, respectively, five years ago, now exchange hands at $2,020 and $0.378.

In response to XRP’s five-year lackluster performance, X user Van Hasen pointed fingers at Ripple, the payment firm closely associated with XRP. Hasen alleged that Ripple releases $3 billion worth of XRP to its business customers quarterly. This commenter believes the massive token release contributed to the XRP’s poor performance over the last five years.

However, Attorney Bill Morgan disagrees. He first corrected that Ripple does not release $3 billion XRP per quarter. Instead, Ripple releases one billion units of XRP monthly from its escrow account but often locks back about 800 million of the released tokens.

Moreover, Morgan argued that a monthly release of 200 million XRP tokens from Ripple weighs much less than XRP’s daily trading volume, which surpasses one billion. Besides, he highlighted that other tokens, such as Solana (SOL), also undergo a similarly scheduled token release, which has not negatively impacted their market prices over the last five years.