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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says Ripple’s routine over-the-counter sale of XRP is not affecting the price of the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The price of XRP is down 27% this year, while Bitcoin has surged 175%, according to CoinMarketCap.
The big disparity led a crypto influencer known as Crypto Bitlord to create a petition urging his thousands of followers to support him in demanding Ripple stop selling portions of its holdings to crypto exchanges and institutions. So far, more than 3,500 people have signed the petition.
In a new interview with CNN, Garlinghouse compares Ripple’s holdings of more than half of the total supply of XRP to Bitcoin whales that own large quantities of BTC and says that ultimately, he believes Ripple can’t affect the price of XRP.
“If you look at the correlations between XRP and most of the crypto market, or what are often called the altcoins, you see a very high degree of correlation.
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Ripple can’t control the price of XRP any more than the whales can control the price of Bitcoin. Some of these markets, particularly smaller tokens that have a lower market cap and lower flows, if you will, they are at risk of people manipulating them. But you’re talking about XRP trades an order of magnitude of a billion dollars a day of activity according to CoinMarketCap. So I don’t think anybody’s in a position to really manipulate those prices…
Around the ownership price, as is the case with Bitcoin, there’s some big whales that were early in the Bitcoin community. There’s one wallet that has a million Bitcoin in it. Nobody knows who owns it. In the XRP community, Ripple is the largest owner.”
As the biggest single owner of XRP, Garlinghouse says it’s not in Ripple’s best interest to flood the market with the digital asset. He also points to Ripple’s use of XRP as a tool to fund the development of the XRP ecosystem.
“The point I have made is we are the most interested party in the success of the XRP ecosystem. We’re very focused on our use case and how do we solve problems with XRP. One of the things I’m excited about is you’re seeing a growing ecosystem of other players investing in other use cases around XRP.
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Just recently we announced a partnership with Coil, which is doing micropayments for content. So the next time you’re reading a story on the Financial Times and you hit that paywall, you hypothetically just pay a dime, a quarter, 50 cents, where today that’s a pretty hard problem. And companies like Coil are going to use XRP for those micropayment transactions.
So yes, Ripple owns a lot of XRP. We’re very interested in the success of XRP. But the accusations of us dumping, that’s not in our best interest to do that. We’re clearly interested in a healthy, successful ecosystem. And so, we would never do that and in fact have taken steps to lock up most of the XRP we own in escrow. Essentially, we can’t touch it.”
Crypto Bitlord is also threatening to fork the XRP ledger if Ripple doesn’t stop selling XRP. Since the XRP Ledger is an open-source technology, Garlinghouse says a fork may happen.
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“When people talk about forking technologies, you have seen Bitcoin forked multiple times. You have Bitcoin Cash, BSV, Bitcoin Diamond, I can’t name them all. There’s four or five forks of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin, obviously, the primary BTC, has remained the most notable.
But in the same way, people can take XRP, an open-source technology, and hypothetically they could fork that if they chose to do so.”
In its latest quarterly report, Ripple says it sold $251.51 million worth of XRP in Q2, and plans to sell less this quarter.
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