Like many other international exchanges, a large number of Japanese trading platforms delisted or “temporarily suspended” XRP trading after the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought charges against Ripple executives, alleging that they had “knowingly” sold XRP as an “unregistered security.”
Ripple has hotly disputed this claim, and a protracted legal battle has ensued, with no sign of a victory or defeat forthcoming on either side.
But XRP adoption rates remain high in Japan, where Ripple’s presence has been boosted by its close association with the SBI Group, the Japanese financial conglomerate that owns TaoTao.
SBI bought TaoTao in 2020 from its business rival SoftBank’s Yahoo Japan. Earlier this month, it announced plans to merge the TaoTao platform with its own-branded SBI VC Trade crypto exchange. The latter already offers XRP trading, in addition to bitcoin (BTC) and three other major altcoins.
The news comes hot on the heels of another coup for XRP in Japan. The e-commerce giant Rakuten’s crypto exchange Rakuten Wallet resumed XRP trading on September 8.
Exchange rivals such as GMO Coin and BitBank also list the token.
However, it comes as little surprise to see an SBI subsidiary add XRP support – after all, SBI is one of Ripple’s closest partners. The two firms run the SBI Ripple Asia cross-border remittance platform and the SBI CEO Yoshitaka Kitao is a Ripple board member. SBI has even given out XRP bonuses to its shareholders, and its e-sports team pays its roster in XRP.
At 11:10 UTC, XRP was trading at USD 1.06. The token was down by almost 5% in the past 24 hours, with a weekly price drop of 18.7%, and a monthly drop of 3%.
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Learn more:
– Japan’s SBI to Merge Its Crypto Exchanges a Year After Rival Takeover
– SBI Backs Ripple XRP Ledger for NFT, Tokenization
– SBI Takes Over TaoTao Exchange That Just Ditched Binance
– Ripple Teases ‘Explosive’ Growth in Asia after Japan Remittance Deal
– Coinbase Pro Accidentally ‘Re-Lists’ XRP Amid Spat with SEC
– SEC Request for Slack Messages is ‘Extraordinarily Burdensome’, Says Ripple
