I started covering crypto five years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover crypto currency full time. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. People in the industry thinking for a while that XRP is a security: SEC lawsuit against Ripple being close to a fraud case: įormer SEC commissioner Joe Grundefest on the case: what the wider implications of the case are for the rest of the crypto industry.whether there might ever be a digital token that is determined to be a security for specific transactions but not others.how this case compares to some of the other big SEC/crypto securities cases, Kik/Kin and Telegram.what Ripple’s defense, in its summarized Wells submission, was.what this means for Coinbase, in particular, because it’s going public later this year.whether or not the SEC might go after exchanges or other players who made money off XRP or collaborated with Ripple around XRP trading.what happened with Ripple’s lead investor in its most recent fundraising round.whether or not Ripple could become an SEC-reporting company and XRP a security.how this will likely impact XRP investors.Stephen’s and Gabriel’s predictions on how the lawsuit will play out.how strong the SEC’s case is against Larsen and Garlinghouse.how even on a technical level, the XRP network is centralized.
the SEC’s case for why XRP is a security, and Ripple’s role in it.why it’s unlikely the case will go to the Supreme Court.why the idea that XRP is a currency and therefore cannot be a security will likely not fly.why the complaint comes close to being a fraud case, but why the SEC didn’t charge them with fraud.why their sales showed an information asymmetry, and why that matters.what was so “egregious” that the SEC went after two executives, Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse, were charged.and Gabriel Shapiro, partner at BSV Law, discuss the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple and two executives, Chris Larsen and Bard Garlinghouse.
In addition to its investment and collaborations, SBI also bought the Japanese exchange TaoTao in 2020.Stephen Palley, partner at Anderson Kill. The Japanese giant has also since revealed plans for a cryptocurrency joint venture, partnering with crypto firms around the world. In fact, SBI Holdings came out in support of its co-collaborator during the lawsuit with Tetragon. Ripple Labs have had no such disputes with any other investors from that time. The funding round raised a total of $200 million, bringing Ripple’s value at the time to an estimated $10 billion. SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial company that was already in a joint venture with Ripple at the time (namely SBI Ripple Asia), also participated.
Tetragon was among the leading investors in Ripple’s Series C round back in 2019. In doing so, it violated the United States Securities Act of 1933.Īt the time, Tetragon asked the Delaware Chancery Court to force Ripple Labs to call a halt to any transactions until it bought back $175 million worth of the shares it issued. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) professed that, since 2013, Ripple had raised over $1 billion with the sale of XRP. The original allegations centered around a shareholder’s agreement between Tetragon and Ripple Labs, first entered in 2019. A lawsuit that Ripple Labs representatives called “ opportunistic.” The case goes back to January, where Tetragon, an investment management group based in the UK, sued Ripple to force it to buy back $175 million in shares. Litigation is a high-stakes game and Tetragon not only has to fulfill contractual obligations but pay two sets of lawyers.” Details of the case
“I assume that the Ripple/Tetragon contract had a clause in it that the ‘prevailing party’ would receive attorney fees and costs from the other side.