Brad Garlinghouse speaks at Topeka High School in 2017
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple Labs Inc., plans to file a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the sale of his XRP cryptocurrency.
Garlinghouse, a graduate of Topeka High School, has been fighting this lawsuit for two and a half years.
"After a 30-month investigation and after the production of more than 200,000 pages from the defendants and third parties, the best the SEC can do is allege that Mr. Garlinghouse was generally aware of the risk that some digital assets could possibly be deemed to be securities but that he worked hard to ensure that XRP did not even appear to have those features," says a letter by Matthew Solomon, on behalf of Brad Garlinghouse.
The SEC alleges Garlinghouse sold over 357 million of his XRP for approximately $159 million and that these transactions occurred at various digital asset trading platforms. Garlinghouse also directed sales of some of his company's XRP. Garlinghouse attorney Solomon says those platforms alleged by the SEC seem vague and seem to obscure what the SEC knows but merely hints at with passing reference to Mr. Garlinghouse's worldwide sales. The truth is that the vast majority of Mr. Garlinghouse's XRP sales were made on foreign exchanges and those transactions do not and cannot violate the federal securities law, Solomon wrote.
Yesterday on Brad Garlinghouse Twitter account, he posted a tweet saying, "Today, a letter was filed on my behalf indicating my intent to file a motion to dismiss in response to the SEC's amended complaint against me. Simply put the SEC's allegations are regulatory overreach."
The SEC says that XRP is a security and should have been registered with the SEC as such. The SEC says XRP is a security because of "an investment contract."
Yet Solomon says the SEC fails to understand the XRP market for the past eight years. XRP, he says, is a digital
asset used to make faster, cheaper, and more efficient payments and money transfers. That is the business model at Ripple.
Garlinghouse has said Ripple sells a blockchain technology to banks and payment providers to do real time settlement between banks. He says the current banking system for settlement between U.S. and foreign banks is lengthy and time consuming.
I know Bitcoin is considered a commodity by the SEC. Why would XRP be any different? XRP is listed as one of the top cryptocurrencies in the world by market capitalization on the top cryptocurrency websites, such as coinmarketcap.
Garlinghouse, the son of Kent and Susan Garlinghouse of Topeka, is a graduate of University of Kansas and Harvard Business School.
When XRP was trading around $2.50 to $3.00, Forbes published an article in January 2018, saying Garlinghouse was worth $9 billion. But XRP fell from those highs to $0.47 cents in recent trading.
Brad Garlinghouse was inducted into the Topeka High School Hall of Fame in 2017. Here is an article about that event.
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