Crypto bears are clawing hard on XRP, amid a legal suit filed against it by a powerful financial regulator in the world’s largest economy
What you should know: At the time of drafting this report, XRP traded at $0.26406, recording losses of 61.45% on the day. It was the biggest one-day percentage drop since May 28, 2015.
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- The price plunge seen in XRP pushed its market value down to $12.16 Billion, or 1.92% of the total cryptocurrency market value. At its highest, XRP’s market value was $31.6 billion.
- XRP had been trading around $0.25690 to $0.44785 in the previous twenty-four hours.
- Over the past seven days, XRP has seen a drop in value, as it lost 48.69%.
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What this means: Ripple and its top executives were accused by the U.S. Securities regulators of deceiving crypto investors about the status of XRP, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market value, in selling over $1 billion of the crypto assets without approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
- The complaint alleges that Ripple raised funds, beginning in 2013, through the sale of digital assets known as XRP in unregistered security offerings to investors in the U.S. and worldwide.
- Ripple also allegedly distributed billions of XRP in exchange for non-cash consideration, such as labor and market-making services.
- According to the complaint, in addition to structuring and promoting the XRP sales used to finance the company’s business, Larsen and Garlinghouse (Ripples’ co-founder and CEO respectively) also affected personal unregistered sales of XRP totaling approximately $600 million.
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Meanwhile, in an official press release, Bitwise, a leading crypto hedge fund, announced recently that its holdings on XRP had been closed because its fund “does not invest in assets that are deemed securities under federal or state securities laws.”
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It continued:
“Bitwise’s decision to liquidate its position in XRP was based on consideration of new public information from the SEC’s complaint.”
