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Three months ago I wrote a deep dive on $XRP circulating supply that was only sent to @MessariCrypto subscribers. As the Q2 2019 Transparency Report is due next week, I am happy to release the full study publicly and discuss some estimations for Q2 Sales. messari.io/c/research/mes… 
One of the key findings was that the real 6-months inflation (from October 2018 to March 2019), based on on-chain analysis, was likely to be 11.6%, compared to 4.5% reported by Ripple’s API.
Another finding was that Ripple had increased the % of volume-restricted $XRP sales on exchanges that had been otherwise identified as having a high proportion of fake volume and the reason for this was unclear.
I conducted an on-chain analysis, starting with the identifiable “Genesis” addresses (Block 32,570) to identify most Ripple-affiliated wallet addresses, including founders & foundation wallets. The sell-pressure was not only coming from Ripple itself, but also from Chris Larsen
Now up to Q2 2019, the sell-pressure from Ripple founders has intensified. Chris Larsen’s addresses distributed over 300M $XRP during the quarter, while Jed resumed selling its XRPs in early June, after a 5-months break.
Moreover, one unidentified Genesis Address, that had initially received 200M, started sending funds to exchanges approximately at the same time (early June), after 5 years of inactivity. And if you are wondering, there are still 1.6B $XRP located in similar inactive addresses.
This sell-pressure from founders, coupled with Ripple’s own distribution, is likely a key factor driving $XRP's underperformance to date.
Over a month ago Ripple declared “Ripple’s sales of $XRP in Q2 2019 will be substantially lower (as a % of reported volume) than in the previous quarter—with our stated target of 20bps for programmatic sales of $XRP volume, as reported by CMC, likely dropping to less than 10bps.”
But CMC reported volume for XRP was 3 times higher in Q2 than in Q1 2019. Based on some on-chain analyses of Ripple wallets, I believe the programmatic sales should be less than 10bps of reported volume yet higher than any other quarters apart from Q4 2017 at around $140,000,000.
One last point, for those who claim that XRP is a deflationary asset. While it is true the outstanding supply keeps decreasing over time, at the current burn rate, it would take an additional 20 years for the to burn what distributed by the foundation/founders EVERY DAY...
Apart from Q1 2018*
