LMAO at wrongfully sued. Let's take a trip down memory lane. This is why their execs drive 1 of 1 multi million dollar lambos, yet XRPL isn't a top 40 used chain (less than 1% marketshare in RWAs, less than .01% in stablecoins, 46th in developer ecosystem)
- "Large-scale unregistered public distribution of XRP and—with the goal of immense profits—simply assumed the risk that they were violating the federal securities laws."
- "In a December 2017 interview with Bloomberg Garlinghouse stated 'I’m long XRP, I’m very, very long XRP as a percentage of my personal . . . balance sheet' (though he had already sold at least 67 million XRP)"
- Garlinghouse "instructed certain Ripple employees to 'proactively' attempt to increase speculative trading value with positive XRP news", employed "supply limiting tactics", and "approved the buy back option" to increase XRP price.
- "Ripple actively sought to offer and sell XRP widely as possible.....for an imagined, future use case"
- "December 2017, Garlinghouse explained that XRP’s price had risen because Ripple was 'solving a real problem . . . a multi-trillion dollar problem around cross-border payments'"
- Through 2016 to 2019, Ripple began selling two software suites, xCurrent and xVia "neither uses XRP or blockchain technology."
- "The first potential use that Defendants touted for XRP—to serve as a 'universal digital asset' and/or for banks to transfer money—never materialized"
- "On June 21, 2018, Garlinghouse explained in a public speech that nobody was using XRP to effect cross-border transactions as of that date. Instead, he said that Ripple “expect[ed] this year for at least one bank to use XRP in their payment flows, to use xRapid"
- "Since its launch, ODL has gained very little traction, in part due to certain costs of using the platform...Much of the onboarding onto ODL was not organic or market-driven. Rather, it was subsidized by Ripple.
-Though Ripple touts ODL as a cheaper alternative to traditional payment rails, at least one money transmitter found it to be much more expensive and therefore not a product it wished to use without significant compensation from Ripple....Ripple had to pay to the Money Transmitter significant financial compensation—often paid in XRP—in exchange for the Money Transmitter’s agreement to help Ripple increase volume on ODL....
-Specifically, from 2019 through June 2020, Ripple paid the Money Transmitter 200 million XRP, which the Money Transmitter immediately monetized by selling XRP into the public market, typically on the very days it received XRP from Ripple.
The Money Transmitter publicly disclosed earning over $52 million in fees and incentives from Ripple through September 2020....The Money Transmitter became yet another conduit for Ripple’s unregistered XRP sales into the market, with Ripple receiving the added benefit that it could tout its inorganic XRP “use” and trading volume for XRP. The Money Transmitter has served that principal purpose for Ripple in exchange for significant financial compensation"
- "Even after ODL’s launch, Ripple publicly acknowledged in July 2019 that XRP has no significant use beyond investment"
- "Ripple and Garlinghouse did not disclose to XRP investors or the public the full extent of incentives that Ripple provided to the Money Transmitter in return for its assistance in increasing XRP trading volume.....
Ripple created an information vacuum such that Ripple and the two insiders with the most control over it—Larsen and Garlinghouse—could sell XRP into a market that possessed only the information Defendants chose to share about Ripple and XRP"