Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlock beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Even though it announced in advance that it had received the SEC indictment letter, Ripple failed to stop panicked investors from leaving the market.
In addition to the plummeting currency price, the negative impact of regulators’ positive “sniping” on XRP is still fermenting. Unlike Telegram and Kik, the SEC directly named two core figures of Ripple in this lawsuit against Ripple: CEO Brad Garlinghouse (Brad Garlinghouse) and co-founder Chris Larsen (Chris Larsen), Directly pointing out that the two raised funds by issuing tokens without registration, and manipulated the XRP currency price by sitting on the bank to make a profit of more than 600 million U.S. dollars.
As a project that appeared before Bitcoin, Ripple has been deeply involved in the vortex of high-level dissatisfaction and team cash-out since the issuance of tokens. It once went to court with the founder who had left in 2014.
In the 71-page prosecution document released by the SEC, the name of Jed McCaleb (Jed McCaleb) was not mentioned. In the past few years, the co-founder who received 9.5 billion XRP has already He sold billions of XRP to the market, and his other identity is the co-founder of Stellar.
20 billion XRP was allocated to three team members, and very few people held a lot of chips. What happened to Ripple back then?
Ripple's predecessor: RipplePay
The history of Ripple can be traced back to 2004. The project "RipplePay" created by developer Ryan Fugger (Ryan Fugger), the core is to establish a peer-to-peer payment network that can replace the banking financial system, which sounds very similar to Bitcoin.
In 2011, Bitcoin became more and more familiar to people, and RipplePay seemed to have encountered a bottleneck, because every link in the chain of trust was not always credible. In May of the same year, Jed McCaleb, an early Bitcoin developer, joined the company, possibly to address the “flaws” in the project.
McCaleb is a man with a story. He founded Mt.Gox in 2010 and sold the platform to Mark Karpeles in March of the following year. The researchers later analyzed the reasons for the collapse of Mt.Gox. When the cloth was sold, there was already a liquidity problem, and the gap was as high as 80,000 bitcoins.
Fugger gradually handed over control of the company to McCaleb because of his ill health. In 2012, McCaleb hired Chris Larson, former chairman and CEO of peer-to-peer lending platform E-Loan, as CEO. The arrival of Larsen also marks the beginning of a new era for Ripple.
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Early RipplePay (above) and later Ripple (below)
Under his leadership, Ripple caught up with the wave of blockchain project currency issuance and successfully completed commercialization. At that time, Bitcoin had become a representative of peer-to-peer transfers, and the community realized that the peer-to-peer structure did not seem to work, and ordinary users were unwilling to fully trust their counterparties. In order to solve the problem, the company decided to build a gateway (Ripple Gateway), which can be said to be a compromise that integrates traditional financial institutions with peer-to-peer networks.
In September 2012, Kraken founder and CEO Jesse Powell (Jesse Powell) and another investor participated in Ripple's first round of investment, with an investment of about $200,000.
Three people share 20 billion XRP
In January 2013, the team began to promote the issuance of tokens. Since the company was controlled by McCaleb and Larsen, the two conspired to take away 9.5 billion tokens each, and this seemingly extremely unreasonable distribution method is also origin of the dispute.
According to the token distribution plan, the total amount of XRP is 100 billion, of which 80 billion are allocated to the company, 20 billion to the three founders, of which Larsen and McCaleb received 9.5 billion respectively, and the other mysterious and never After showing up, Arthur Britto, the founder who was once considered non-existent, took away 1 billion.
Due to differences in ideas, and Larsen, who was good at capital operations, won the support of a new investment institution at the time, McCaleb was "forced" to leave Ripple, and Stefan Thomas, an early Bitcoin follower, took over as technical director post. In order not to affect the issuance of tokens, Ripple did not disclose the news of McCaleb's departure until one year later in May 2014.
The dispute between the founders is just the tip of the iceberg, and even early investors are very dissatisfied with Ripple. In May 2014, Kraken founder and CEO Jesse Powell posted that he had not received what he deserved.
In his view, the reason why Ripple can achieve such achievements is entirely based on the company's resources, and it is totally unreasonable for McCaleb and Larsen to allocate XRP to themselves, and ask them to return XRP to the company.
"Before McCaleb left, I asked the founder to return the tokens to the company. McCaleb agreed, but Larsen refused." Several people negotiated many times, and only Larsen always disagreed. In order to have a certain bargaining chip against Larsen, McCaleb did not return it in the end, which led to a series of subsequent disputes.
Questions about the unreasonable token distribution scheme have been surrounding Ripple.
When McCaleb left, there were fears that he would dump his nearly 10 billion XRP holdings into the market, crashing prices. In order to calm people's hearts, McCaleb reached an agreement with Ripple, stipulating the amount that can be cashed out in the next few years.
Later litigation documents revealed that McCaleb's relatives sold 96 million XRPs to Ripple for $1 million. Ripple, who received the coins, turned around and asked Bitstamp to freeze the other party's account, accusing it of violating the agreement.
Ripple and McCaleb were at loggerheads, and in 2015, Bitstamp, which was involved for no reason, had to take both parties to court to determine a final settlement. The lawsuit lasted until February 2016, when the two parties settled and made new adjustments to McCaleb's XRP locking agreement.
The "gold master" behind Ripple
Although the co-founder has left, Ripple is still highly sought after. Judging from Ripple's hundreds of business partners, it is estimated that the later ChainLink will not be able to compare.
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Ripple's Many Banking Partners
The reason why Ripple is so popular is that in April 2013, Ripple received $1.5 million in financing from institutions such as Google Ventures, a16z, IDG Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, and Vast Ventures.
In addition to the endorsement of institutions such as Google Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Capital, there seems to be a Japanese consortium behind Ripple. In September 2016, the Japanese consortium SBI Group acquired a 10.5% stake in Ripple for US$55 million. The two parties also cooperated to establish SBI Ripple Asia in 2017, which is 60% owned by SBI Group.
