Ripple ends 2020 in hot water

Ripple is being bombarded not only by the USA Securities and Exchange Commission which has filed a court case against Ripple accuding it of raising $1.3 billion through the sale of unlicenses digital asset securities, which breaches the investor protection laws. The USA SEC called XRP an investment contract while Ripple states its coin is a currency just like others and is not linked to Ripple's deed fr its price.

This however has not hindered the fall of Ripple price and the delisting of XRP from various cryptocurrencies. Three cryptocurrency exchanges including OSL, CrossTower and Beaxy have paused trading of XRP because of the fear of being fined by SEC if it is found that XRP is deemed a security. The SEC also accused Ripple of bribing exchanges to allow the trading of XRP cryptocurrency on their respective trading places. Around 10 of these exchanges were even not registered with the US SEC by the time they listed XRP. However, Brad Garlinghouse revealed that Ripple is determined to aggressively fight to the end to see that it wins this court case.

Even MoneyGram International issued a statement with regards to SEC lawsuit against Ripple stating, " The company has not currently been notified or been made aware of any negative imact to its commercial agreement with Ripple but will continue to monitor for any potential impact as developments in the lawsuit evolve." MoneyGram has had a commercial agreement with Ripple since June 2019; this agreement represents the use of Ripple's foreign exchange (FX) blockchain trading platform (ODL) for the purchase or sale of four currencies. MoneyGram has continued to utilize its other traditional FX trading counterparties throughout the term of the agreement with Ripple, and is not dependent on the Ripple platform to accomplish its FX trading needs.

Ripple has indirectly attacked other cryptocurrencies majorly Bitcoin and Ethereum by accusing them of being controlled by the Chinese government. This led to a reply from Vitalik Buterin the founder of Ethereum who has been campaigning against Ripple and XRP, calling it a shitcoin.

However, there are other people from the crypto community who think Ripple’s comment on BTC and ETH being superintended by China is correct. For instance, a Redditor called jadeddog believes that since the majority of the hash power (over 51%) is in China, then the two cryptocurrencies are owned by the Chinese government. He/she wrote: “So BTC and ETH *don't* have 51% of their hash in China? I'm confused, is that not correct? I'm a big-time ETH backer, so this isn't me throwing shade at ETH, but I'm pretty sure that this is true.”

In the last one week, XRP has hit a high of $0.653909 and a low of $0.221363. At press time, XRP/USD is trading at about $0.369 with a market cap of around $12.216 billion and volume of $17.331 billion, according to the data by CMC.