Ripple the worst-performing cryptocurrency of the year so far
Ripple has been revealed as 2018’s worst-performing cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalisation. Ripple has lost over 74% during the first quarter, compared with Ethereum and Bitcoin’s loss of 40%.
In what has been challenging period for the cryptocurrency sector overall, total market capitalisation has fallen by over 50% this year.
Performance in 2017
Ripple enjoyed a 35,000% price increase in 2017 after starting the year at less than 1 pence, but after hitting a high of almost $3.50 on January 7, it was trading in the region of 54 cents this Thursday.
Ripple uses XRP tokens – XRP is listed on over 60 exchanges and has a market cap of over 21 billion, but is not listed yet on the US exchange Coinbase.
Expert Forecasts
Speaking to CNBC, the CEO of BitBull Capital Joe DiPasquale explained the fall as part of a wider trend affecting cryptocurrency, such as the advertising bans announced by all three tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google, and also Initial Coin Offering fatigue.
“We believe the macroeconomic factors and regulatory factors and time to market with many crypto products will take the rest of the year to settle out.”
Meanwhile, the managing partner at Capital Fund Law Group, John Lore, also said:
“There’s a lot of short-term trepidation based on regulatory uncertainty based on the SEC, with what the European Union is doing, and what various Asian regulators are doing. I think the sell-off this year has more to do with short-term concern than any long-term general distaste for the asset.”
Capital Fund Law Group, a firm that offers advisory services to hedge funds and private equity groups operating in the crypto-space, and Lore added that he’d been observing an “unprecedented” number of new fund starts continuing.
Earlier in the week, the sole top 20 cryptocurrency by market cap to be operating in positive territory was VeChain, which has been up by over 28 percent since the start of 2018, due to big-name partnerships and a structure that offers investors attractive and unique incentives not to sell. Thursday also saw Tron, another digital currency, turn positive, which is now up 9.25 percent for the quarter.