- XRP Ledger (XRPL) recorded 2.7 million transactions in the first quarter, surging by 113% quarter-on-quarter, while the average daily active addresses shot up 37%.
- Payments skyrocketed 350% to over two million daily, and with an AMM launching towards the end of the quarter and the upcoming stablecoin, XRPL is projected to boom further this year.
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) had a record-setting first quarter of the year, with data from Messari revealing that the network recorded growth in almost every metric.
XRPL continues to attract a rising number of users seeking to take advantage of its low fees and fast transactions. In Q1, the average daily transactions hit 2.77 million, growing by 113%, quarter-on-quarter (QoQ), the New York-based blockchain analytics company revealed.
Messari noted that the activity boost was from the introduction of inscriptions. First introduced by the Bitcoin blockchain in early 2023 as Ordinals, inscriptions have spread to every other blockchain network. On XRP, they landed late last year through the XRP Script Project, pushing network activity to a four-year high at 4.11 million transactions in 24 hours, as Crypto News Flash reported.
The average daily active addresses increased by 37% to 41,000, up from 30,000 in Q4 last year. However, they are yet to catch up with the 66,000 recorded in the first quarter of last year. The total new addresses also saw a dip, with Messari attributing it to the slowdown in inscription activity after the initial spike.
XRPL now boasts 5.15 million addresses, a 3% increase in the past three months of the year.
One interesting statistic was that in Q1, there was a sharp rise in payment transaction activity that wasn’t accompanied by a matching rise in active addresses. This meant that users were making more payments on average, including one particular week where XRPL recorded 22 million payments. Messari attributed this to the rise of inscriptions and expect it to even out in time.
After Strong Q1, What’s Next for XRPL?
Diving further into the numbers shows that while payments and transfers soared, the decentralized in XRPL still lags behind most of the other major networks, including Solana and Ethereum.
In DeFi, the market cap of issued currencies—which is the name given to fungible tokens on XRPL—decreased by over 10% to $142 million. And while it’s easy to launch tokens on the network (proven by the 3,300 total currencies issued), earning investor interest has proven challenging.
Messari data shows that Sologenic’s SOLO token dominates the field, accounting for over 40% of the DeFi market cap. In fact, combined with the two other biggest tokens—Coreum and Gatehub Fifth—they account for two-thirds of the entire ecosystem’s market cap.
In Q1, the average daily DEX volume of the issued currencies was $789,000, a 41% dip from the previous quarter.
NFT activity was also underwhelming, with DEX volume exceeding NFT volume by 5,300% in Q1.
Meanwhile, XRP trades at $0.53, barely moving over the past day and maintaining its low volatility over the past week, where it has only shed 0.2%, as Crypto News Flash reported.