Did Ripple Bribe Coinbase?

The head of XRP markets at Ripple, Miguel Vias denied all allegations of paying off Coinbase to list the third largest cryptocurrency on their exchange.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, Ripple’s native token XRP has been listed on Coinbase Pro. Soon after it was listed, rumours surfaced that suggested Ripple had bought their way onto the platform as it quickly became clear that the XRP token was breaking one of the regulations that are required to get onto the exchange.

The response followed a series of bribery accusations which was aimed at Coinbase after its sudden announcement of adding XRP trading pairs to its platform on 26th February. On the other hand, Coinbase had earlier remained cautious of the said listing. Many have speculated Coinbase’s careful approach was down to the unusual history of XRP with Ripple Labs - this is down to the fact that Ripple holds around sixty percent of XRP which is worth billions of dollars.

Furthermore, the company was most likely concerned about a pending $167.7 million class-action lawsuit against Ripple which would most likely determine whether XRP is a security asset or not.

Controversy

Nevertheless, according to Alistair Milne all the genuine concerns about Coinbase came and went in almost an instant.

The CIO of Altana Digital Currency Fund reached Elliott Suthers, Coinbase’s communications director, through an email with a set of “interrogative questions”. Suthers was asked whether or not Coinbase was looking out for permission of either the Securities and Exchange Commission or Commodity and Futures Trading Commission before offering XRP to the public. Moreover, Milne was asked whether there was a secret deal between Coinbase and Ripple for listing XRP pairs.

Milne took to Twitter to share an email that Suthers had sent him on 26th February. Suthers said that he Coinbase were happy to talk about the questions off the record but Milne took the response as a piece of evidence showing that Ripple had bribed Coinbase in order to get a listing on the platform.

You can see the tweet below:

Did Ripple pay Coinbase for their token being listed?
"we're not discussing publicly"#xrp #youregoddamnrighttheydid pic.twitter.com/cuuxWGt6ch

— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) February 26, 2019

Vias

Miguel Vias contradicted Milne’s statement in a tweet posted on 28th February. Vias made it clear that Ripple didn’t pay Coinbase anything in order to get a listing on the platform and he also claimed that XRP wasn’t their token.

We’re happy to go on the record. Coinbase’s listing of XRP (also, not “our token”) was Coinbase’s independent decision - we did not give them anything to make it happen. https://t.co/xTVvACqsQa

— Miguel Vias ⚡ (@miguelvias) February 27, 2019

The fact that he said that XRP is not their token suggests that as a company, Ripple didn’t issue XRP tokens.

Whereas Ripple has a lot of supporters, it seems that they also have a lot of haters. The company goes through a lot when it comes to hold the majority of XRP stakes. In response to the claims that the digital asset isn’t decentralised, Ripple locked away their 55 billion XRP token away from themselves in a cryptographic escrow account. The time-based smart contracts would release 1 billion XRP on the first of every month. So at the end of each month, Ripple would place the remaining unused tokens into a new escrow account which is set to expire in another 55 months from creation.

Even so, Ripple had a say when it came to distributing XRP tokens.

In October 2017, Ripple launched a RippleNet accelerator program in order to increase the XRP utility. The firm allocated a $300 million XRP fund from its escrow holdings and declared that it would reward those financial institutions with XRP that test RippleNet payment framework. as a result of this, Ripple was able to attract partnerships from mainstream financial firms.

The post states, “This rebate — available in XRP or USD — is designed to accelerate adoption and usage of Ripple solutions.”

According to a Bloomberg report published in April last year, one of the most significant tools for Ripple in order to boost the adoption of XRP was free distributions or incentivisation.

In the Bloomberg report, they say that Ripple had suggested paying financial incentives to cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase or Gemini for listing XRP on the platforms. When it comes to Coinbase, Ripple has allegedly offered to lend $100 million in XRP to start letting its users trade the token. The company had reportedly made a similar offer to Gemini although it was $1 million not $100 million.