The value of XRP has increased by 59% following a significant verdict in the closely monitored lawsuit between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple.
Today, XRP opened at $0.47 and has now climbed to $0.75 thanks to Judge Analisa Torres’ decision that Ripple’s automatic sales of XRP on the open market do not qualify as securities.
“Indeed, Ripple’s Programmatic Sales were blind bid/ask transactions, and Programmatic Buyers could not have known if their payments of money went to Ripple, or any other seller of XRP. Since 2017, Ripple’s Programmatic Sales represented less than 1% of the global XRP trading volume. Therefore, the vast majority of individuals who purchased XRP from digital asset exchanges did not invest their money in Ripple at all.”
The allegations made by the SEC against Ripple executives Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen regarding unregistered securities offering by selling XRP, were dismissed by Judge Torres.
However, the judge agreed with the SEC’s claim that the direct sales of XRP to institutional participants by Ripple were indeed a securities offering.
“An Institutional Buyer knowingly purchased XRP directly from Ripple pursuant to a contract, but the economic reality is that a Programmatic Buyer stood in the same shoes as a secondary market purchaser who did not know to whom or what it was paying its money…”
Ripple in the news
According to a recent report by the Bank of America (BofA), Ripple is one of the few companies that is having a significant impact on the international payments systems through blockchain technology, especially in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.
BofA analysts consider Ripple as an exceptional example of blockchain’s potential for cross-border payments.
“Another technology that is having an effect on real-time activity in APAC, albeit to a lesser degree than APIs (application programming interface), is blockchain. It’s used as an underlying security measure in certain transactions, but it’s not having the level of success that its preceding hype had suggested, notes Venkat.”
The notes continued and said this:
“It has played an important role in helping to digitize trade documentation, as the technical basis of the smart contract, but in cross-border payments, the work of Ripple is a possible exception, its impact has been limited, he comments. The reason for this is the rapid emergence of SWIFT GPI (global payments innovation) as the favored solution for tracking and tracing cross-border payments.”
