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- Ripple CTO David Schwartz said the company would have gone public if it had been formed outside of the United States.
- Schwartz said a Ripple IPO was something he had looked forward to and why he opted for stock compensation.
- An XRP community member argued that the Ripple team released XRP in lieu of an IPO
Ripple Labs chief technical officer David Schwartz believes Ripple would have been a public company if it had been formed outside of the United States.
In a recent post on X, Schwartz said the “trajectory that took Ripple away from an IPO was completely unexpected.” Previously, the CTO had mentioned that a Ripple IPO was something he had looked forward to.
The CTO’s statements came in a debate with another XRP community member about why Ripple didn’t go public. According to the user, Ripple Labs released the XRP token in place of an IPO, suggesting that the company favored the token drop over an IPO to raise money.
However, Schwartz countered that he never equated XRP’s launch with an IPO. He continued by saying that a possible IPO was why he opted for Ripple stock for compensation instead of XRP. “My intention and belief was always that the way this would make money was for Ripple to IPO [sic],” he tweeted.
Meanwhile, as earlier reported, Wall Street financial expert Linda Jones said the most feasible date for Ripple to go public is May 2024. She based this date on an anticipated bullish trend in the crypto market, reduced inflation, and lowered interest rates.
Schwartz’s statements mirror the prevailing sentiment at the blockchain payment company. Indeed, Ripple executives have accused the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of stunting its growth after the regulator filed a lawsuit against the company.
The ongoing lawsuit is expected to come to a close next year. Prominent pro-XRP lawyer John Deaton stated that fines against Ripple may be minimal. The lawyer based this on the lack of fraud and the fact that over 95% of XRP sales happened outside of the U.S. Elsewhere, XRP saw its steepest decline in the past week in the early hours of Wednesday. Data from CoinMarketCap shows the token has shed over 3% of its price in the last 24 hours. At the time of press, XRP is exchanging hands at $0.5917 apiece.
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