Ripple tried to settle with SEC before suit: CEO Brad Garlinghouse

Ripple CEO revealed the company approached the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a settlement before the lawsuit

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse revealed on Wednesday that the company tried to settle with the regulatory body before the charges were made official. He revealed this in a Twitter thread, claiming that Ripple sought to settle charges of conducting unregistered securities transactions before the regulator sued it.

The CEO talked about five issues regarding the SEC’s suit against Ripple. However, he added that there was a limit to what he could say about an ongoing case.

Garlinghouse’s first question was on why Ripple didn’t settle with SEC. He answered that he couldn’t go into specifics, but Ripple will continue to try to resolve the issue with the new administration.

The next question is whether Ripple paid exchanges to list XRP and when the cryptocurrency will be relisted. He replied by saying, “XRP is one of the most liquid (top 3-5) digital assets globally, and 95% is traded outside the US. Ripple has no control over where XRP is listed, who owns it, etc. It’s open-source and decentralised”.

XRP suffered huge losses following the SEC lawsuit as several cryptocurrency exchanges announced plans to delist it from their trading platforms. Coinbase, Binance and some of the other leading crypto exchanges have already announced the date for XRP’s delisting from their platforms.

Garlinghouse maintains that most of the exchanges are halting XRP trading and not delisting the cryptocurrency from their platforms. “With eight different govt agencies, each with their own (and sometimes opposing) views of crypto, the US market participants are facing conflicting policies and no surprise, some act conservatively”, he added.

He maintains that Ripple is working on responding to the SEC lawsuit but admits that the legal process can be slow. However, he assured his followers that a lot is happening behind the scenes. On the issue of whether investors still have faith in Ripple, Garlinghouse replied affirmatively. He stated that becoming a Ripple shareholder means buying their stocks (and not XRP).

Finally, on paying customers to use XRP, Garlinghouse maintains that Ripple built a product and provided some customers with incentives to use it. “Every payments network (PayPal, Visa, MC, etc.) have or still uses incentives”, he added.

XRP suffered heavy losses following the SEC lawsuit, with the cryptocurrency losing its third place in the market to Tether (USDT). The XRP price is down by nearly 50% despite recent excellent performance to reclaim the fourth spot from Litecoin.