Ripple’s tough days have only gotten worse. After the fintech company was the subject of an SEC lawsuit over its flagship XRP token last week, Coinbase announced in a blog post on Tuesday that Ripple trading would be suspended on its platform.
According to the blog, Ripple fans can continue to trade the token in a limited capacity until the XRP suspension takes effect on January 19. Coinbase noted that this would not impede its clients’ access to their XRP wallets, nor would it prevent them from using those same wallets for their daily deposits and withdrawals.
Pick up the boat from the biggest exchanging digital currencies in the country is a pretty serious rejection – and one compounded by previous blanket bans of OKCoin and Bitstamp, two medium-sized currency exchanges that broke ties in the immediate aftermath of the SEC’s suit. The value of XRP on Coinbase’s site has been in free fall for the past week, losing more than half of its valuation before the SEC spit came to light.
For those in need of a refresher, the SEC’s core claim was that Ripple had been selling XRP as a currency for the past seven years when in fact it should have been classified as security always, and subject to the type of investor-oriented public disclosures required of securities so that those investors can assess the risks. The SEC claimed that in the past seven years that Ripple’s investors have been kept in the dark, the company raised “at least” $ 1.38 billion and continued to use that money to boost its business “without disclosing how it did it. stated the SEC.
In response to these allegations, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse initially defended XRP’s currency title in a series of Tweets before turning into a conspiratorial-sounding tirade that claimed – among other things – that the Chinese government had some sort of control over other cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ether. We’ve reached out to Ripple for comment and will update if we hear anything.
G / O Media can receive a commission