If you’re a Ripple investor and you’ve been distressed over XRP’s inability to hit a major fiat exchange, don’t worry. Garlinghouse and his team have been trying.
However, that may be little consolation, considering all their attempts have been in vein. Ripple is currently the third largest crypto-asset on the market, with XRP’s price tag of $0.50 adding up to a $19.8bln market cap. Its success has led Jeff Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, to be one of the world’s first and few cryptocurrency-made billionaires.
Still, all of this success and the fat stacks of cash that comes with it mean little to Gemini and Coinbase exchanges.
Even as Ripple tried to buy its way onto either exchange, neither would consider it, according to anonymous tips given to Bloomberg. A listing on either exchange would earn the currency a title alongside crypto’s nobility, as Coinbase only features Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, while Gemini is more exclusive still with only Bitcoin and Ethereum listings.
Indeed, fiat pairs are a coveted commodity in the cryptocurrency realm, where getting a token listed on an exchange of any kind is a high-rolling endeavor. So high-rolling, in fact, that some projects pay anywhere from $1mln to $3mln to have their coins listed, according to a report by Autonomous Next.
For Ripple’s own efforts, these prices are fairly accurate. Per Bloomberg’s sources, the organization offered the Winklevoss-owned Gemini $1mln dollars for a USD/XRP pair on its exchange. The attempted deal, which was brokered in 2017, would have seen XRP listed in Q3 of the same year. When Gemini declined the offer, Ripple reverted to additional negotiations, such as a rebate payment plan and fronting the costs of the integration.
No dice.
After this impasse, Ripple turned to Coinbase last fall, arguably the more popular of the two options, as Coinbase runs the worldwide table on crypto-to-fiat trading pairs. And this time, Ripple upped its ante, offering to loan the company $100mln worth of XRP to kick-start trading on Coinbase and, presumably, its exchange counterpart, GDAX. As part of the deal, Coinbase would be allowed to pay back the loan in either XRP or dollars, while the sources pointed out that the later option would have given Coinbase the opportunity to profit off the deal if XRP increased in price after the listing.
No Comments