Ripple, one of the leading cryptos to date, managed to secure a vital partnership with Bhutan’s Royal Monetary Authority (RMA), or its central bank. The partnership implies the central bank’s use of Ripple’s CBDC solution to bring sustainability and financial inclusion.
The RMA is going to push out a pilot program, divided into several phases via a private version of the public, open-source XRP Ledger (XRPL).
“The RMA believes that easier, faster, and more affordable payments, both domestically and internationally, will help it reach its goal of increasing financial inclusion by 85% by 2023. The power of the technology underlying the XRP Ledger, combined with Ripple’s experience in cross-border payments and tokenization, will harness the tremendous speed, cost, and innovation advantages in support of this mission,” Ripple announced about the partnership.
Ripple has made its fair share of adoptions in 2021, with the CBDC solution standing as an energy-efficient, cost-effective and reliable alternative to other systems. Indeed, in May 2021, the National Bank of Egypt and Dubai’s Lulu Exchange made a deal for smooth cross-border payments from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Egypt via RippleNet.
The latest adoption skyrocketed Ripple’s price, as the now sixth-largest crypto to date made a 10% price increase in the past 24 hours, outperforming Solana (SOL) with a market cap of over $46 billion and a price tag of $0.9954 per XRP token.
However, Ripple’s partnership announcement comes just as Judge Sarah Netburn of the Southern District of New York denied the company access to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s employees' trading records.
This is another blow at Ripple’s legal battle with the SEC. In January 2018 both sides signed a memorandum in which the SEC provided ethics guidance to its employees regarding digital assets. Ripple assumed that prior to the memorandum agreement, the SEC didn’t have any policy on digital assets, which led to Ripple's filing notion for access to SEC employees’ trading records.
However, Judge Netburn went with SEC’s thesis that the preclearance resolution method for each asset “does not involve any determination by SEC Ethics Counsel that a trade complies with the securities laws.”
“Because the preclearance process does not consider whether an asset is a security, Defendants have not shown that such individual trading decisions bear on the issues in this case. Although the SEC’s policies (or absence of policies) may provide relevant evidence related to fair notice or recklessness, how an Ethics Counsel viewed a trading decision is more likely to cause confusion or create collateral litigation disputes,” Judge Netburn ruled.
Judge Netburn’s ruling comes amid the U.S. Congress has presumptively prohibited disclosure of such financial information, to protect the privacy of government employees.