By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 18th, 2024
Despite all the rumors Miguel Vias, Ripple’s head of XRP markets, insists that they haven’t paid Coinbase for XRP listing.
The XRP community needed to wait for quite a long time until the coin was listed by Coinbase. But finally, the US major cryptocurrency exchange has taken a decision to add support for XRP to its professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro.
The announcement about this long-awaited decision was made on February 25 which resulted in a significant boost of the XRP liquidity. The price of the coin increased by more than 10 %. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that at the moment of writing XRP is being traded for $0.32 with a market cap of $13.28 billion.
But it was not the end of good news for the XRP community. On February 28, it was revealed that now XRP would be available not only on Coinbase Pro but also on the company’s other platforms: Coinbase.com and the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Users of these platforms now have an opportunity to buy, trade, convert, send, receive and store XRP.
Paid Listing?
After XRP was listed by Coinbase, some people voiced an idea that Ripple may have paid to Coinbase for it. These rumors took their roots in a Twitter dispute initiated by Alistair Milne, United Kingdom-based entrepreneur and investor.
He shared an image of his conversation with Elliot Suthers, Director of Communications at Coinbase, in which Coinbase’s representative noted that they “are not discussing publicly” the details of the deal with Ripple.
Moreover, for many users, traders and analysts it looked rather suspicions that Coinbase had finally decided to list XRP despite all its previous doubts whether XRP is a security.
All these factors made some people think that Ripple had paid for the listing.
Nevertheless, Miguel Vias, Ripple’s head of XRP markets has put an end to these discussions posting a tweet in which he also highlighted that it was an independent decision taken by Coinbase.
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
Vias has emphasized that XRP is not Ripple’s token. The company is doing its best to distance from XRP in order to avoid all the accusation about centralization of XRP and its being a security, though many people consider that it belongs to this class. But if it is so, it means that there was a clear violation of Coinbase’s rules when XRP was listed.
Previous Accusations
Though Ripple denies all the accusations of paying for listing, it’s not the first case when it has been accused. Last year, it was informed that Ripple planned to buy its entrance to Coinbase and Gemini platforms.
At that time it was revealed that Ripple offered $1 million USD to Gemini executives for listing XRP and some of them were even said to have expressed their interest in such a proposal.
As for Coinbase, it was supposed that with a view to get listing Ripple tried to lend Coinbase over $100 million USD worth of XRP.
Though all this information was provided by anonymous sources and there were no real proofs attached, these rumors now only boost the growing suspicions about Ripple’s strategies of cooperation with exchanges.
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