Can Ripple Lawsuit Cause Problems For Angel Investor Ashton Kutcher?

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As XRP is still bleeding from the SEC lawsuit and sees it’s price drop some 25% in the past 24 hours, commentators claim that the effects of this could go well beyond Ripple labs and cryptocurrency itself.

Already in 2018, there were reports in the worldwide business media, who saw the then 6-year-old token being presented on both the Ellen show and Stephen Colbert’s late night, the XRP was choosing to give away tokens in order to create a usage for itself. The events made it to the front pages of Fortune, The New York Times and the Financial Times.

Problem is that XRP has firstly, since those golden days of 2018, dropped seriously in value and secondly, the old business media is now coming back for it’s pound of flesh as Shakespeare would elegantly put it. We explain.

Davos introduction

Chris Larsen, the head of Ripple Labs now being sued by the SEC together with CEO Brad Garlinghouse, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos for the first time in 2016. Back then he just wanted to introduce the payment system that Ripple Labs had set up.

Thanks to the introductions and networking of the duo, Garlinghouse is a charming man as many will attest in Silicon Valley, the Bank of England invited Ripple a year later to introduce them to the world of crypto and blockchain.

In a 2019 freedom of information request made to the Bank of England they admitted that:

In 2017 the Bank undertook a proof of concept (‘PoC’) exercise with Ripple which was one of a number of PoCs which it undertook with several companies.

By the end of 2017, as most of loyal readers of this site know, XRP went on a tear together with Ether and Bitcoin and rose to its highest value ever, making the Ripple Labs team billionaires. Classic finance looked on in envy as they knew crypto would one day come for them.

Kutcher enters

In order to, according to their current critics, create a market for XRP, the group then chose to give away large sums on known US television shows, mostly through means of actor Ashton Kutcher, a known young tech investor.

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Many are now wondering about whether these giveaways could prove the SEC’s point that Ripple engaged in illegal behavior and was simply printing money.

Critics of Ripple, mostly to be found in the classic financial sphere of course, already stated that the giveaways of free XRP on the Ellen Degeneres show and the Stephen Colbert show could be seen as an illegal security sale.

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Although the point is now repeated given the SEC’s lawsuit, it sure looks like all the financiers in Davos back in 2016 who saw the world’s rich and famous fall for the charms of Ripple Labs, have gotten their dish of revenge served ice cold this time round.

Is Ellen in trouble as well now?🙃

— .-. (@EvgenyGaevoy) December 23, 2020

The Financial Times, their PR mouthpiece par excellence, even brought up the Kutcher introduction again yesterday, claiming that the SEC could go as far as to investigate those giveaways as well.

We’ll see how it turns out, but as for a regulatory threats for the cryptosphere go, this lawsuit could just be the opening salvo.

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