Ripple’s CEO has come out to clarify recent sales of XRP after being called out for “dumping” the token. Brad Garlinghouse spoke with CNN on January 5th to explain his side of the recent sell offs of XRP by Ripple.
As always, any discussion of XRP and Ripple led to a debate on whether the price of XRP was unduly influenced by Ripple or not. Garlinghouse made the claim:
“Ripple can’t control the price of XRP any more than the whales can control the price of Bitcoin.”
Nebulous Claims of Integrity
The main point he was trying to hammer home was the idea that Ripple may be the largest stakeholder in XRP, but they did not have undue influence on the price movements of XRP. Even more importantly, they weren’t selling off the tokens at their peak to cash out.
“In the XRP community, Ripple is the largest owner, and the point I have made is we’re the most interested party in the success of the XRP ecosystem. ”
To further his point, Garlinghouse went on to talk about the difference between dumping and strategically selling of coins. The sale of $200K worth of Ripple (1 billion XRP) at the beginning of 2020 from their escrow accounts does seem like a continuation of a long trend of selling off mass amounts of XRP for the profit of RIpple, but Mr. Garlinghouse insists this is not 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 interests to do that.”
Another way to look at all of this is that although Ripple remains strongly tied to XRP and believes in their future, they also have to think about short-term financing. This would lead them to have to sell XRP to fund current operations, and seems very logical. You can’t fault a company for wanting to stay afloat. But at the same time, if they are staying afloat on the dime of other investors, then you should be very wary.
Putting Limitations On Non-Ripple Investors
With all this in mind, it is especially interesting that any large XRP buyers are subject to dumping restrictions. Garlinghouse made it very clear that any institutional investors purchasing large amounts of RIpple would be subject to lock-ups so they don’t dump XRP on the market.
That there aren’t similar restrictions that apply to Ripple does say a lot about the level of independence Ripple is placing on themselves as compared to other investors. Basically, they can dump, but others can’t. In a lot of ways, this interview further made the case that Ripple could control the price of XRP. And Ripple is still well-positioned to remain the top token holder going forward, especially with these unattractive restrictions in place.