#XRP #XRPCommunity
In September of 2017 R3 consortium, which represents around 40 of the leading banks sued Ripple to reinstate its options contract which Ripple had canceled due to failures in the promotion clause. Ripple countersued in January 2018 saying that although R3 represented to Ripple that it would have access to its large consortium of leading banks, R3 knew and had reason to know that several key banks that would be instrumental to Ripple’s success would soon be departing from its consortium.” This refers to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Santander who chose not to remain in R3’s consortium of almost forty banks.
Now, a few of those banks made their own agreements with Ripple. But, at least one did not (as far as i can tell) JP Morgan.
In June of 2018 Bill Hinman then director of the SEC's Corporation finance division gave a speech in which he gave clarity to Bitcoin and Eth causing the price of both to skyrocket. (I'm sure some people were very very happy that day, particularly the disguised Eth whales.) We now have a strong reason to believe that XRP was also due to receive some clarity that day... but something had changed in the months leading up to the speech, and someone, or something, had decided to exclude them.
Coincidentally or not, later that same year 15 senior JP Morgan executives would find themselves in Ripple's offices... we can only assume the discussion was about XRP. Were they looking to partner with Ripple? or buy them out? They had at this time been working with EthLab on Quorum for some years and subsequently announced JPM Coin in February 2019, so I assume the latter. (This was around the same time Ripple and R3 settled for 1.04 billion XRP)
It clearly wasn't going well for JP Morgan. They sold the product they had worked on for the last 5 years, Quorum, to Consensys in August 2020, whilst allegedly illegally acquiring 10% of Ethereum's core infrastructure MetaMask and Infura in a shady backdoor deal with Joseph Lubin known as "Project North Star" (This is in court now)
Things for Ripple, however, were going much better. They inked a deal with Moneygram in June 2019 and many others thereafter. However, it appears that JP Morgan wasn't done with Ripple, and had, what appears to be, a large number of communications with the SEC about Ripple and XRP. 4 months after Quorum was sold to Consensys the lawsuit of the century was dropped on Ripple by the SEC...
The search for the truth will continue.