Last year, a lot of people had doubts about the future of Ripple’s XRP. The company had seen some tough times as it had to face lawsuits and some people from the crypto community were sure that its tokens would be deemed as securities, which would have been a heavy blow.

However, now the second largest crypto network in the world by market cap has reached a very important milestone: XRP Ledger has more than 1.5 million users now, as shown by XRP Stats. This is a very significant measure that made the day of the XRP community.

The growth of the Ripple network is actually huge when you take into account the fact that the company had less than 1.3 million accounts ack in June 2018. This means that seen a growth of over 15% in its users during the crypto winter, which is destroying a lot of crypto-dependent businesses.

This metric is, in fact, very important because there are minimum funding requirements to have an account. This means that people need to hold at least 20 XRP (around $6 USD, at the time of this report). The quantity is not very high, but it means that no empty wallets created by curious people will exist in the official numbers.

Without having even 20 XRP, no user can make a transaction on the network. However, one can let an account be empty for some time and then put some XRP on it to activate it again.

Not everything is so good, though, as the issues of centralization continue to plague Ripple as they have done for a long time. At the time of this report, the Top 100 accounts owned 78.7% of the XRP. Only eight accounts have over 8 billion XRP, for instance, which marks a very heavy centralization of the ecosystem.

Most of the money is actually owned by Ripple itself, which makes the whole thing even more concerning, as there simply does not seem to exist a way to make this network more decentralized (and some people that this is not really the goal of the owners).

However, Ripple officially denies these centralization “accusations”. According to the new Chief Market Strategist, Cory Johnson, Ripple has a cryptographic lock that prevents the company from selling off its tokens, which would mean that you can trust Ripple to keep them in custody and not to use them to influence the market.

Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC) Price Analysis Watch (Feb 8th)

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