Ripple and CEO Brad Garlinghouse Sued By Obscure Puerto Rican Organisation

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As broken by CoinDesk, Ripple and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse are being currently being sued by a relatively unknown Puerto Rican company called Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement (BMA). In total, Ripple and Brad Garlinghouse are accused of violating both federal and state (California) laws on seven different counts.

The lawsuit pertains primarily to the XRP token sale, which Ripple conducted back in 2013 and successfully raised USD $1.1billion . BMA alleges that these funds were raised fraudulently - with the token sale constituting an unregistered securities sale as defined by regulatory authorities such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the USA.

According to the lawsuit, one of the main reasons for this is that the XRP token had no utility at the initial time of sale in 2013, meaning that all of its value was derived from value speculation.

Ripple vs Google

This legal battle against plaintiff BMA isn't the first legal controversy facing Ripple lately, nor is it likely to be the last. 

In late April 2020, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced in a series of tweets that he and Ripple had decided to take YouTube to court with allegations that the social media platform had “failed to police their platforms from being abused by the entirely preventable imposter giveaway scams” - calling it the “epicenter for imposter scams” and claiming that it had “done next to nothing in response to our constant takedown requests”.

He continued to suggest that “YouTube’s inertia is indicative of an industry-wide problem of a lack of accountability” - making comparisons to Instagram also.

Twitter has previously stressed publicly that it would be banning all cryptocurrency advertising on its platform - and so if these allegations are true: it implies some level of hypocrisy, and a little irony.

Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz had his channel suspended by YouTube shortly following the filing of this report, although it is difficult to conclude whether this is related to the lawsuit.

Rumour Busting

In other Ripple news (or more like: non-news) is a rumour which began circulating yesterday that Brad Garlinghouse had accidentally revealed news of a big new acquisition after a live interview with CNN, mistakenly believing he was not on-air when the comments were made.

The news was published on Coil by an author who goes by the username @XRP_Productions. According to a transcript published by the author, Garlinghouse said the following off-camera into a live microphone:

"I wish I could have told her about us buying R3… Oh well, we'll be able to talk about it later this month. Hey, you wanna watch some more Tiger King? God, I just loooooove that show!"

It should be clear from the tone of the message that Garlinghouse did not make this comment, however this didn't stop several publications from subsequently covering the story.

The fictitious nature of this news is further unravelled when considering the negative relationship that the Ripple and R3 have had in the past - including a lawsuit of their own. Additionally, upon looking up the author on Coil - you will find that their profile reads "Calm down, folks. It's called s-a-t-i-r-e.".

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