According to CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple, based in San Francisco, is ready to move overseas if it loses the regulatory court battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Speaking to Axios media house at the Collision conference in Toronto, Garlinghouse said his company could relocate away from the U.S. if the XRP lawsuit is lost. “It’s not that we could, we will,” the chief executive officer asserted.
Ripple has been embroiled in a legal fight with the SEC, which alleges that the company skirted securities laws by selling the XRP cryptocurrency to investors. The scorching complaint seeks to establish whether or not XRP is a security.
Ripple, however, maintains that though it holds a huge chunk of XRP tokens, the network used to settle XRP transactions is completely decentralized. As previously reported, the cross-border payments company expects the case to conclude next year. Garlinghouse has previously stated that the long-running lawsuit is going “exceedingly well” than he expected.
But if it loses, it will focus its business outside the U.S. This is basically how the company has been operating ever since the SEC dropped the hammer on Ripple in December 2020 and named Brad Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen as defendants. Ripple recently unveiled an office in Toronto, Canada, with over 150 engineers and employees.
The Ripple Case Could Make Or Break The Crypto Industry
For years, XRP held the No.3 spot on the crypto rankings, just behind bitcoin and ethereum. Ripple had built strong alliances with widely-known banks and payment processors. However, the lawsuit muddied the company’s reputation and many of these companies ended their partnerships while crypto exchanges rushed to eject the XRP cryptocurrency from their platforms.
Winning the case will theoretically boost growth for Ripple’s business as it will give other US-based companies the courage to work with it. Leaving would considerably hamper the company’s overall growth as Garlinghouse admits the U.S. is the world’s largest economy.
Industry watchers have noted that the case will not only decide the fate of the firm but shape the future of the wider crypto sector by establishing a precedent for the regulatory treatment of crypto assets in the United States.
If Ripple loses, the outcome could also mean more crypto companies exiting the U.S. to other friendlier jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Ripple intends to explore an initial public offering once the $1.3 billion lawsuit with the SEC has ended.
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