Jim Duffy
It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, right? And as far as Ripple is concerned, the fat lady hasn’t even left the dressing room yet for her performance.
Ripple and its share price have come tearing back with a vengeance signalling that CEO, Brad Garlinghouse and all of his legal team are up for a fight with the authorities. This one will be better that any Mike Tyson ticket in Vegas as Ripple and its huge global community jab and weave.
Cryptocurrency, the crypto-sphere and crypto-twitter are truly tribal in its worst forms sometimes. The race to the top to de-throne Bitcoin from the number one spot in terms of market capitalization is getting fierce with both Ethereum and Cardano stoking flames in their boilers. The Bitcoin maximalists are like biblical apostles preaching the gospel according to Satoshi, while new churches are formed around “demi-gods” like Charles Hoskinson of Cardano and Gavin Wood of Polkadot.
All it takes is one finely tuned tweet to set off a whole raft of accusatorial crypto bile that gets more intense as the threads increase. Ripple has been one of the victims that suffered the most, having been delisted from large US exchanges, while it fights the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] in the American courts.
So it goes without saying that Ripple is bloody and bruised. But, it is the SEC that is now on the ropes and the Ripple price action has been meteoric. Settling today around $0.91 amid a market lag, Ripple burst through a dollar yesterday, up a whopping 70%+. This prompted Garlinghouse to take to social media with a subtle, but cogent tweet,
“Today was a good day.”
The SEC has picked a public fight with Ripple. It announced it had filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and two of its executives in December 2020. It claimed that XRP was a security and that the company had raised more than $1.3 billion through the sale of XRP tokens, which the SEC called
“an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering”.
The lawsuit is still ongoing and there is some reason to believe that Ripple Labs will be cleared while XRP is allowed to operate as a whole and credible cryptocurrency.
So why has Ripple rallied? Only this weekend, Ripple won a legal battle to keep its private emails from going out into the public realm during the lawsuit, but it is not clear if this was the sole reason for the price pump. Nevertheless, even small nuggets of good news like this can have massive ramifications for price action in crypto.
Just imagine if Ripple actually wins its case! Then watch out Cardano, Ethereum and Polkadot.
Garlinghouse and Ripple are not out of the woods yet. It is a complicated case made more so as XRP holders, who lost money when the coin fell to $0.22 after the lawsuit was announced, have also filed a motion to defend Ripple. Ripple has strong hands in its corner and the SEC will have to display a cleverness in its approach.
One thing is for sure. This verdict in this legal case will be historic. If the SEC loses, then it will have to go lick its wounds for a long time as the growing crypto landscape snickers loudly. But, if it wins, there will be many in crypto who will also be nervously waiting for that summons to fall through their letterbox.
Ripple fans – enjoy the win for now. But remember, reputations are at stake and the SEC will have a few tricks up its sleeve.
