Ripple Labs

Last updated

Ripple Labs, Inc.
Company type Private
Industry Computer software
Founded2012 [1]
Founders Chris Larsen
Jed McCaleb
Headquarters
San Francisco, California,
,
United States
Number of locations
50 countries [2]
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Alan Safahi (Advisory Board)
David Schwartz (Chief Cryptographer and Chief Technology Officer)
Ken Kurson (Advisory Board)
Brad Garlinghouse (Chief Executive Officer)
ProductsRipple Payment and Exchange Network
Number of employees
1,120 (2023) [2]
Website ripple.com

Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California. [1]

Contents

History

Origins and early history

In 2011, engineers David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb began a financial infrastructure similar to bitcoin that would use substantially less energy and drastically reduce transaction time. In September 2012, Chris Larsen and McCaleb co-founded the corporation OpenCoin. [3] On April 11, 2013, OpenCoin announced it had closed an angel round of funding with several venture capital firms. That same month, OpenCoin acquired SimpleHoney to help it popularize virtual currencies and make them easier for average users. [4] On September 26, 2013, OpenCoin officially changed its name to Ripple Labs, Inc. [1]

On October 6, 2015, the company was rebranded from Ripple Labs to Ripple. [5]

Introduction of banking sector products and international expansion

In March 2018, a Japanese bank consortium led by SBI Ripple Asia, comprising 61 banks launched "MoneyTap", a Ripple-powered mobile app to provide on-demand domestic payments in Japan. [6] In May 2018, Spanish Banking group Santander released One Pay FX — the first mobile application for international payments powered by blockchain technology, that uses Ripple's xCurrent technology. [7] XCurrent is not a blockchain or any form of distributed ledger. Ripple CTO David Schwartz described it as "bi-directional messaging" that can eventually plug into distributed ledgers. [8] Following the creation of a Mumbai office, Ripple added multiple Indian customers in 2018, including leading banks such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, and IndusInd, that announced that they started using Ripple's products. [9] Ripple's CEO predicted that by end of 2018 "major banks" would be using Ripple tools that made use of the XRP cryptocurrency and that by end of 2019 "dozens" of banks would be using XRP. [10] However, neither of those predictions came to pass in the specified time frame.

In May 2023, Ripple acquired Switzerland-based crypto custody firm Metaco for $250 million. In addition to expanding its potential customer base, the purchase also expanded the company's international presence during a time of increased scrutiny by the SEC towards U.S. cryptocurrency companies. [11] [12] In June 2023, Ripple received approval for a license from the central bank of Singapore to offer regulated digital payment token products and services. [13] [14]

In April 2024, Forbes referred to it as a "crypto zombie" noting the company was not making progress in disrupting SWIFT, in 2023 generated $583,000 in fees, and that the company has $24 billion worth of XRP tokens in escrow that it could sell over the following four years. [15]

Funding round (securities offering)

Ripple is a privately funded company. It has closed five rounds of funding, which included two rounds of angel funding, one round of seed funding, one Series A round, one Series B round and one Series C round. [4]

DateFunding
type		InvestorAmount
(million $)
April 2013Angel Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel LLC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Vast Ventures, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund2.5
May 2013Angel Google Ventures, IDG Capital Partners 3.0
November 2013SeedCore Innovation Capital, Venture51, Camp One Ventures, IDG Capital Partners 3.5
May 2015Series A IDG Capital Partners, Seagate Technology, AME Cloud Ventures, ChinaRock Capital Management, China Growth Capital, Wicklow Capital, Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Core Innovation Capital, Route 66 Ventures, RRE Ventures, Vast Ventures, Venture 5128
October 2015Series A Santander InnoVentures 4
September 2016Series B Standard Chartered, Accenture, SCB Digital Ventures, SBI Holdings, Santander InnoVentures, CME Group, Seagate Technology 55
December 2019Series CTetragon, SBI Holdings, Route 66 Ventures200

Partnerships and initiatives

In March 2014, CrossCoin Ventures launched an accelerator which funds companies that work to advance the Ripple ecosystem. The firm funds accepted startups with up to US$50,000(equivalent to $64,352 in 2023) in XRP, Ripple's native currency, in exchange for a 3% to 6% stake in diluted common stock. Mentorship and support is provided by CrossCoin and Ripple Labs, Inc. [16]

Ripple also developed early partnerships with companies such as ZipZap. [17] [18]

Ripple Labs was a co-founding member of the Digital Asset Transfer Authority (DATA) in July 2013. DATA provides best practices and technical standards, including anti-money laundering compliance guidance for companies that work with digital currency and other alternative payments systems. [3]

In 2018 Ripple donated a quantity of XRP valued at $29 million to USA public schools. [19]

In March 2019, Ripple announced a $100 Million fund for gaming developers which would be overseen by Forte. [20]

Recognition

For its creation and development of the Ripple protocol (RTXP) and the Ripple payment/exchange network, the magazine MIT Technology Review listed Ripple Labs as one of 2014s "50 Smartest Companies" in its February 2014 issue. The criteria for the recognition revolved around "whether a company had made strides in the past year that will define its field." [21]

On May 5, 2015, Ripple received a US$700,000 civil penalty from the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for "willful violation of the Bank Secrecy Act by acting as a money services business without registering with FinCEN". [22] The company agreed to remedial steps to ensure future compliance, including an agreement to only transact XRP and "Ripple Trade" activity through registered money services businesses (MSB), among other agreements such as enhancing the Ripple Protocol. [22]

On June 13, 2016, Ripple obtained a virtual currency license from the New York State Department of Financial Services, making it the fourth company with a BitLicense. [23]

In September 2017, blockchain startup R3 sued Ripple for specific performance of an option agreement in which Ripple agreed to sell up to five billion XRPs (the native cryptocurrency of Ripple protocol) for a price of $.0085. Ripple countersued, claiming that R3 reneged on a number of contractual promises, and was simply acting in a spirit of opportunism, after the cryptocurrency increased in value more than 30 times. [24] In September 2018, Ripple and R3 reached an undisclosed settlement agreement. [25]

In February 2020 an article in Financial Times Alphaville revealed that MoneyGram, the largest public user of Ripple's XRP based liquidity tools, had received a $50m investment prior to adopting the tools and also that the software was provided free of charge by Ripple and that MoneyGram was receiving an on-going subsidy for using XRP, amounting to $8.9m in Q4 2019. The same article revealed that Ripple was dependent on sales of XRP to remain profitable. [26]

On December 22, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ripple and two of its executives with violating investor protection laws, filing suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. [27] The SEC alleged that Ripple, co-founder Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse, raised more than $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering. The government agency brought charges against Ripple [28] for depriving the “potential purchasers [of XRP] of adequate disclosures about XRP and Ripple’s business and other important long-standing protections that are fundamental to our robust public market system,” according to the complaint that the SEC filed in federal district court in Manhattan, New York. [29] In April 2021, Judge Sarah Netburn granted a motion from Garlinghouse and Larsen to dismiss the SEC's subpoenas for access to eight years' of banking records, referring to the request as a "wholly inappropriate overreach." The defendants agreed to turn over all data involving XRP transactions. [30]

In July 2023, the district court ruled on the SEC lawsuit, finding that the XRP token sold by Ripple Labs was not a security. However, if sold in institutional sales, or used as a fundraiser, such actions could be classified as a security in those circumstances. More specifically, the programmatic sales of XRP on public cryptocurrency exchanges do not meet the third prong of the Howey Test, [31] so subsequent sales by exchanges are not securities. Judge Analisa Torres issued a summary judgement in the case after over two years of litigation between the SEC and Ripple. [32] [33] In October, the SEC announced that it would be dropping their lawsuit against Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen. [34]

In June 2024, Ripple's legal chief Stuart Alderoty said that the company has spent over $100 million defending itself in litigation brought by the SEC. [35]

Political activities

In December 2023, Ripple contributed $25 million towards the establishment of a super PAC called Fairshake, along with two affiliated super PACs, collectively raising $78 million from cryptocurrency industry companies, executives and investors. [36] [37] In May 2024, Axios reported that CEO Brad Garlinghouse had announced the donation by Ripple of an additional $25 million, with a pledge to give $25 million more each year for "as long as there are crypto naysayers slandering the industry". [38] [39] The Hill reported that more than $10 million of the super PAC's spending went toward opposing the California Democratic Senate primary bid of Katie Porter, who lost in the March 2024 primary. [40]

As of June 2024, CNBC reported that Fairshake had backed the winning candidate in 33 of the 35 House and Senate primary races it had entered. [41]

Controversies

At a conference in June 2019, Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek commented that his company had experimented with Ripple in 2018 but had chosen not to adopt their cryptocurrency based payments software, asserting that it was "five times more expensive", than using their existing infrastructure. [42]

In October 2020, Ripple board member Ken Kurson [43] resigned from the company when he was charged with committing a range of cyber-crimes by the United States Attorney for the southern district of New York. [44]

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Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network that is open to financial institutions worldwide and was created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company. Released in 2012, Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol, and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. Ripple purports to enable "secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks". The ledger employs the native cryptocurrency known as XRP.

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