XRP has long had an active and loud community, hence their moniker “the XRP Army.” For some reason, the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization managed to become a crowd-favorite project, with a seemingly endless flow of supporters.
According to new data, however, this is changing, with multiple reports indicating that the Ripple community is shrinking at a rapid clip despite positive fundamental developments.
XRP’s Community Is Shrinking… and Fast
According to “The State of Digital Assets, Q1 2020” — a report outlining the state of the crypto industry penned by multi-asset trading platform eToro and The TIE, a crypto analytics upstart — the XRP Army has begun to shrink at a notable pace.
Over the first quarter of 2020, the two firms observed that the number of Twitter users “discussing” the cryptocurrency fell by 16% while the asset declined by 9.51% during the same time frame.
While there wasn’t an equivalent metric for Bitcoin included in the report, BitInfo indicates that tweets mentioning the word “Bitcoin” actually doubled on average from January 2020 to the end of March 2020, presumably responding to the price crash.
To add to this, data shared by crypto trader Zytek indicated that the number of members in crypto-centric Telegram chatrooms has fallen off dramatically.
His analysis found that from June 2018 to 2020, there have been notable member losses of 25% to 75% in crypto groups from @Decred and @CryptoAlerts to @WhaleClub and @Litecoin. A good portion of these losses took place over the past six months from November 2019 to April 2020.
Ripple/XRP’s channel, in particular, has seen a 63.89% loss in members since June 2018, falling from 64,525 members to 23,299.
Notable Departures
There likely isn’t a single trend that is behind this trend, but there have been a number of prominent XRP proponents that have called it quits, potentially sparking bouts of capitulation.
In October last year, Hodor — a blogger covering the cryptocurrency’s every move that managed to garner 56,000 followers — called it quits, leaving their account and blogs to fade away. The account was largely deemed one of XRP’s biggest driving forces on social media.
Tiffany Hayden — the self-proclaimed “CEO” of XRP — followed suit. On March 9th of this year, Hayden remarked that she has decided to sell all her holdings, despite much of her Twitter following flocking to her page for news and thoughts on the cryptocurrency.
She attributed this sudden decision to the fact that the XRP community was purportedly “attacking her character” after she revealed what she saw as flaws in the cryptocurrency’s underlying network:
“Wherever XRP supporters congregate, they have nothing better to do than talk shit about me, which my parents and children have the pleasure of reading. I’m done. Find somebody else to demonize and spend your life bitching about.”
Furthermore, the cryptocurrency remains over 95% below its all-time high, likely accelerating capitulation as evidenced by social media sentiment about the asset’s performance.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash