At the end of the month of December, the Israeli multi-asset brokerage firm eToro announced to halt the trading of Ripple’s native digital currency XRP following the charges of the United States’ independent agency SEC against Ripple Labs and two of its executives. Now, the decision of eToro is going to turn into reality as the exchange will suspend XRP trading tomorrow, on the 24th of January.
Per the initial official announcement of eToro which was made on the 31st of December, the company said that it would stop offering the trading services of XRP to only those customers which are the citizens of the United States.
Beginning from the 24th of January, the users of the eToro exchange will not be allowed to trade XRP on its trading platform neither they will be allowed to buy more tokens of XRP after the suspension of XRP trading comes into effect. When eToro made the initial announcement, it gave the holders of XRP the deadline of Jan 24 for selling all of their XRP holdings available on the trading platform of eToro. Now, they have only got a few hours as the given deadline has approached.
This decision from eToro came in the wake of the lawsuit filed by the US SEC against Ripple Labs, which is the parent company of XRP. When SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple on the 22nd of December, it put some charges against the blockchain cross-border payments company saying that the firm sold unlicensed securities. And through the sale of these unregulated securities, the company made approximately $1.3 billion worth of profits. The Securities and Exchange Commission not only sued Ripple Labs but it also charged the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Brad Garlinghouse and its other executive, Chris Larsen, with similar accusations. As per the lawsuit filing, they were involved in it.
Several minor and major cryptocurrency exchanges followed the lawsuit of SEC and suspended the trading for the fifth-ranked digital asset. Binance US, Coinbase, Kraken, OKCoin, and Bithumb are one of the prominent ones. However, there is a long list of exchanges that decided to stop offering trading services for Ripple’s native digital token. So far now, there are only two cryptocurrency firms whose decision came in favour of XRP. These are GateHub and Uphold who decided to stand by XRP instead of delisting or halting trading of it.