Ripple Signed 15 New Customers After SEC Lawsuit, Says Garlinghouse

Despite being hit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) $1.3 billion lawsuit, blockchain payments firm Ripple continues to grow and sign new customers, company’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse wrote in a letter published yesterday.

“2020 was a banner year for Ripple, despite a disappointing ending related to U.S. regulation (understatement?). We processed millions of RippleNet [transactions], grew [on-demand liquidity] 12x [year-over-year] and signed 15 new customers after the SEC complaint,” Garlinghouse wrote yesterday.

Per today’s letter, even after the SEC’s lawsuit was officially filed, the company continued to close new customer deals at the rate of two per week. With these additions, Ripple is now seeing “more customers than ever before,” Garlinghouse noted. 

“An increasing demand for digital financial services and payments interoperability in Asia Pacific (APAC) is further propelling the adoption of RippleNet amongst the region’s many SMEs, fintechs and PSPs,” the letter added. “The number of deals signed in 2020 were up 80% year over year and there was a 1,700% growth in transactions.”

At the same time, Ripple continued to onboard new staff members and executives and was “fortunate to be able to continue hiring every quarter in 2020.” 

“We added top talent to our leadership team with strong backgrounds from Apple, PayPal, Amazon, Tesla and Twitter,” Garlinghouse added.

The SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple

As Decrypt reported, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and several of its executives on December 22. In its filing, the regulator alleged that Ripple has raised $1.3 billion in unregistered securities offerings since 2013.

Shortly after, XRP’s market capitalization decreased by 63%—and it still keeps shrinking. In total, the token’s market cap dropped from around $27 billion prior to the lawsuit to roughly $12 billion today. In their turn, most major exchanges have either delisted or suspended trading of XRP.