If you’re a ripple investor and worried about XRP’s inability to hit a major fiat exchange, don’t worry. Garlinghouse and his team tried.
That may not be of consolation, however, considering that all of her attempts have been in vain. Ripple is currently the third largest crypto asset on the market, with XRP’s price of $ 0.50 giving it a market cap of $ 19.8 billion. His success has made Jeff Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, one of the first and few billionaires in the world to be made in cryptocurrency.
Still, all of this success and the associated fat stacks of money mean little for the Gemini and Coinbase exchanges. Even when Ripple tried to buy into both, neither would consider doing so, according to anonymous sources dodging Bloomberg. A listing on either of the two exchanges would give the currency a title alongside the nobility of crypto, as Coinbase only offers Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, while Gemini is even more exclusive and only contains Bitcoin and Ethereum offerings.
In fact, fiat pairs are a coveted commodity in the cryptocurrency space, where listing a token on any type of exchange is a high-profile endeavor. So high, in fact, that some projects are paying anywhere from $ 1 million to $ 3 million to have their coins listed, like this report by Autonomous Next.
For Ripple’s own efforts, these prices are pretty much accurate. According to Bloomberg’s sources, the organization offered Winklevoss-owned Gemini $ 1 million for a USD / XRP pair on its exchange. In the attempted deal brokered in 2017, XRP would have been listed in the third quarter of that year. When Gemini declined the offer, Ripple returned to additional negotiations, such as a discount payment plan and assuming the cost of the integration.
Does not say.
After that impasse, Ripple turned to Coinbase last fall, arguably the more popular of the two options as Coinbase maintains the global table on crypto-to-fiat trading pairs. And this time, Ripple increased its stake and offered to lend the company XRP worth $ 100 million to boost trading on Coinbase and, presumably, its exchange counterpart, the GDAX. As part of the deal, Coinbase was allowed to repay the loan in either XRP or in dollars, while sources indicated that the later option would have given Coinbase the opportunity to benefit from the deal if the price of XRP had risen after the listing.
If Coinbase had listed XRP before January, it would certainly have benefited. However, this is in part due to Ripple’s price hike in anticipation of such a listing. Between December and January, rumors of an impending Coinbase listing drove the price of the coin close to $ 4.00 and reportedly hit an all-time high of $ 3.84 CoinMarketCap. After Coinbase denied these rumors in January – and again in March after they briefly re-emerged – XRP has seen a steep decline.
Part of Coinbase and Gemini’s hesitation could stem from the fact that the United States SEC has warned these unlicensed exchanges not to list tokens they might consider securities. Since XRP is under the control of a single company, Ripple, it is argued that it could fall under such a classification. Such regulatory uncertainty has worried cryptocurrency enthusiasts and entrepreneurs as crypto assets retrospectively labeled as securities could create a legal nightmare for both projects and exchanges.
In response to developments, Emmalee Kremer, a spokeswoman for Ripple, claimed that some of the information given to Bloomberg was inaccurate, despite not specifying exactly which information was specifically incorrect. Instead, she told Bloomberg that “Ripple has always been transparent” [its] Focus on building and growing a strong XRP ecosystem, “and goes on to say that”[the Ripple team wants] XRP is said to be the most liquid digital asset possible to enable faster and cheaper global payments. “
A crypto-to-fiat trading pair on two of the most popular exchanges in the United States would certainly ensure that liquidity. But until there is more legal and regulatory clarity from the US government, or until XRP is exempted from security status, it is unlikely that these pairs will emerge anytime soon.
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