A blogger has seemingly had enough of Ripple’s constant boasts about their “200+ Institutional Customers” and decided to do some investigating. And, the results of this investigation are… interesting. Trolly McTrollface (yes, we know, but bear with us) spotted a number of anomalies in the way Ripple talks about its partnerships with companies and the realities, and clearly wanted others to know too, which led to an explosive blog post.
Junior Web Designers
The first ‘partner’ Trolly looked at, SendFriend, has a website that was “nothing but a couple of web pages a ten-year-old could have pieced together” that he could not sign up to. The next company, JNFX, made a big play about being placed “in the heart of the City” in London, but Trolly discovered that their address was in fact a virtual office used by hundreds of other companies and that this “financial institution” had no sole residence. They also reported zero income ever since incorporating in 2007, which begs the question of why they need the XRP token.
Memorandum of Misunderstanding
Financial Transaction Control Systems is labeled “just one of the hundreds of dying Fintech startups with no traction or hope to get real customers” thanks to its $1 million annual turnover and $1 million annual losses in 2017. Ahli Bank of Kuwait has an ongoing, non-binding ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Ripple, which Trolly describes as “something businesses sign when they don’t want to do something, but don’t want to look like they don’t want to do it.” Finally, Transpaygo, an internet payment provider, “doesn’t have a webpage for sending money over the Internet”.
The Big Fish
Trolly’s investigation irked XRP supporters, who argued that he cherry picked four of over two hundred companies, which is a fair point – a bigger sample would be needed to conclusively tell how many of Ripple’s customers are properly functioning businesses making money. Trolly responded with a follow-up article posted Thursday entitled ‘Ripple’s Lie About Its Santander Partnership’. In it he pointed out a difference in the wording of the Santander and Ripple statements announcing the deal – the Santander announcement stated that their new blockchain-based services would be available to 50% of their retail clients, whereas Ripple claimed that the technology could cover “50% of the bank’s annual international transfers”. Trolly also found that the much-hyped One Pay FX platform is just an iPhone app that has, at present, 17 reviews.
Santander’s Motives Explained?
Trolly accuses Ripple of intentionally using misleading information and engaging in some cherry-picking themselves in order to give a false impression of their integration with banks. He also reveals why he thinks Santander still persist with Ripple – Santander’s VC arm pumped $200 million into Ripple in 2015.
Needless to say, Trolly is not a big fan of Ripple and XRP, and the XRP army are no fan of him. Whether the situation is really as bad as Trolly makes out isn’t clear with such a small sample size, but it’s clear that Ripple does have a tendency to over-exaggerate the importance of deals they have struck. And, while everything is obscured behind the cloak of centralization, it won’t be easy for anyone to find out the truth anytime soon.
