$400 Million Worth of XRP Can Be Linked Back to Ponzi Schemes

There’s a lot of XRP out there and there’s a big chunk of it that related to Ponzi schemes over the years.

Specifically, around $400 million worth of Ripple’s flagship token can be traced back to a variety of Ponzi schemes and darknet activities. This all comes from Elliptic who said the claims in a report released this week on Wednesday. 

While that may sound like a lot, it is in fact only 0.2 percent of XRP transactions. Looking towards the leading cryptocurrency comparison, $829 million of bitcoin, or 0.5 percent of that network’s transactions, have been spent on the dark web.

Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of Elliptic said:

“Regardless of the amount, it just demonstrates that there is illicit activity going on in this coin. Therefore, if you are a business handling some of these transactions then you need to be checking for it because you don't want to be the organization that's being used to launder those proceeds.”

These worries are especially aimed towards the target market of XRP. Ripple owns an estimated 60 percent of the XRP supply and periodically sells the tokens to fund operations leaving many to wonder just how decentralised the token is. The San Francisco-based company has been pitching banks software that utilises XRP for the last few years to some prevail.

A Ripple spokesperson said: 

“Like other cryptocurrencies, XRP is open source and decentralized – it’s available to anyone to use. Ripple enabled XRP transactions are secure and through regulated institutions.”

It will be interesting to see how much more illicit activities XRP is involved in for the future. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!