XRP, Ripple vs SEC: ‘both sides to blame’

Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra, crypto wallet and exchange service made a bullish case for Bitcoin and said the digital asset’s fundamentals were perfect, especially against the backdrop of governments introducing various monetary policies. In a recent interview, Barhydt explained: 

There’s the fact that you’ve got these underlying fundamentals where you’ve never had a probably scarce asset of some kind, ever, never mind digital… The fundamentals are perfect. 

Now, we have a relatively small but growing amount of institutional investors who are saying this is digital gold with a backdrop of governments gone insane…

The Abra CEO who holds Bitcoin, Ether and other altcoins explained that Bitcoin’s price recovery, since its 2017 peak, was driven by a relatively “small amount of speculators with very large holdings.”  

Barhydt also believed that a better technology than Bitcoin could become a reality and speculated whether this project could acquire the same network effects – such as its store of value-based solution and popularity and added:

I’m super bullish on crypto as the future of money and store of value. Whether it’s Bitcoin plus Bitcoin or something else, I don’t know and I really don’t care that much.

Due to the recent SEC lawsuit against Ripple, Abra decided to suspend trading in XRP for US customers. In that regard, the CEO believed the problem was on both sides. He blamed SEC for waiting eight years to regulate the status of XRP and on the other hand, Barhydt thought that Ripple was at fault too and explained:

Now you can have something that starts out as a security sale which eventually becomes a commodity. But that’s not what Ripple said they were doing. They said this was a commodity sale alone, so both sides to me have got this completely wrong. They should have worked this out six years ago.

Additionally, Barhydt said that both parties would be forced to reach a settlement, which could be the likely outcome of the case because, in his view, both, SEC regulators and Ripple have made mistakes.