Ripple is in the middle of a $1.3 billion lawsuit with the US SEC, but that doesn’t seem to bother the company too much.
Its CEO, Garlinghouse, spoke with Reuters and declared that his company hadn’t dealt with negative block back in the APAC business theatre as a result of the current situation with SEC: “It (the lawsuit) has hindered activity in the United States, but it has not really impacted what’s going on for us in the Asia Pacific.”
In December 2020, SEC accused Ripple and its executives of violating securities laws in the sale of XRP tokens, an activity that dates back to 2013.
Garlinghouse believes there hasn’t been any fallout as a result of Ripple’s good standing with regulators in the region: “We have been able to continue to grow the business in Asia and Japan because we’ve had regulatory clarity in those markets.”
This is actually true, as Japan and several other APAC countries have always been favorable for Ripple and XRP, and Ripple even has a joint venture with SBI Holding, a Japanese conglomerate, which forms SBI Ripple.
In March 2020, Ripple expanded further into SE Asia, signing a partnership with DeeMoney, a Thai fintech outfit.
Garlinghouse also downplayed the effects of U.S. exchanges halting the trading of XRP tokens or delisting them completely as 200 platforms in the world continue to list XRP trading pairs.
In December, the chief of Ripple divulged that just 5% of its customers were living in the US and that they were planning to move outside of the USA in case the regulatory environment wouldn’t improve.
Garlinghouse has also filed a motion for the case to be dismissed as the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had classified XRP as a virtual currency in the past.