Ripple’s rough few days just got way worse. After the fintech company was the subject of an SEC lawsuit over its flagship XRP token last week, Coinbase announced in a Tuesday blog post that trades of Ripple would be suspended on its platform.
Per the blog, Ripple fans can continue trading the token in a limited capacity until the he XRP suspension goes into effect on January 19th. Coinbase noted that this wouldn’t hamper its customers’ access to their XRP wallets, nor would it keep them from using those same wallets for their day-to-day deposits and withdrawals.
Getting the boot from the largest digital currency exchange in the country is a pretty serious rejection — and one that’s compounded by earlier blanket bans from OKCoin and Bitstamp, two mid-sized currency exchanges that cut ties in the immediate aftermath of the SEC’s suit. XRP’s value on Coinbase’s site has been in free fall over the past week, shedding more than half of the valuation it held before the SEC spat came to light.
For those that need a refresher, the SEC’s core claim was that Ripple had spent the past seven years selling XRP as a currency, when, in fact, it should have been classified as a security all along, and subject to the sorts of investor-facing public disclosures that are required of securities so those investors can assess the risks involved. The SEC alleged that over the past seven years that Ripple’s investors were kept in the dark, the company raised “at least” $US1.38 ($2) billion dollars, and continued to use those funds to fuel it business operation “without disclosing how it was doing so,” the SEC stated.
In response to these charges, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse initially defended XRP’s currency title in a series of Tweets before devolving into a conspiratorial-sounding diatribe that alleged — among other things — that the Chinese government had some sort of control over fellow cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ether. We’ve reached out to Ripple for comment and will update if we hear back.