Blockchain startup R3 sues competitor Ripple | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain startup R3 sues competitor Ripple

reuters.com

135 pointspetethomas70 comments

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R3 had an options contract to purchase 5 billion Ripples for $42,500,000 any time until 2019

Ripple doesn't like that the same purchase would give Ripple Inc. $1,000,000,000 at today's exchange rates

Ripple doesn't know how options contracts work. ha ha oh well.

I wonder if there is another side to the story. Otherwise, easy case!

You missed a few zeroes in that billion.

thanks, fixed now

Also, shouldn't it be "cause losses" rather than "give"? It is unlikely that a corporation doesn't like being given money.

But would it be possible to sell even $42,500,000 of Ripple right now?

Easily. That's less than the daily volume on just one exchange:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#markets

Of course, you won't get a good deal if you just try and dump $42M worth of Ripple in one sale order. I'd spread it over a week over multiple exchanges.

But note that it will actually be a billion dollars worth of Ripple, which is much much harder to sell.

Right, I was thinking more along the lines of needing to raise the $42 mil to exercise the option.

Anyway, I'm really curious about what the relationship between trading volumes and how much money you can actually get is - it doesn't seem obvious to me. Like, if I'm a trader trying to make short term gains trading a million dollars a day, and I decide on a new strategy that involves doing 10 times more trades, the volume just went up by $9,000,000/day but the underlying demand for currency is still the same.

I posted an ask HN about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203974

It depends which currency/ICO you're talking about. Trading $10M/day in bitcoin world is not a big deal.

You can look at the market depth on various exchanges:

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD

For instance, if you dump $10M worth of bitcoin on Bitstamp, the price will shift by only $270, and that's ignoring the hidden limit orders. And the market will react to it as well - cheaper coins create more demand.

I'm not totally sure what the chart means (and I did read the explanation), but if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that Bitstamp has $10M worth of buy orders for BTC at a price of at least $(current price - 270)?

Yes, that is what he means. You can see a combined order book for most of the large exchanges here:

http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/books/USD

For example, by looking at this chart one can calculate that if one sold 10,000 Bitcoins right now with simultaneous market orders across all exchanges, one would receive north of $40M and the price would drop to $4,000.

That's great in theory, but in practice that's not what happens, because new orders influence existing orders, and cause additional new orders to be created. Much smaller sales can in fact, and to do, cause much larger price movements.

> Right, I was thinking more along the lines of needing to raise the $42 mil to exercise the option.

I have a hunch that finding someone willing to lend $42m, given a court ruling that it can be turned into something worth $1bn, will be quite easy.

If you can quickly sell 42M worth, it's risk free. Otherwise, you're betting on the long term viability of Ripple.

That’s a fair point. I’m not sure how much the Ripple/USD market can actually handle. Probably a lot less than a $1bn market sell order. And selling them slowly isn’t really a solution if people know what’s going on, since they will then front-run the large sell, thus eating up buy orders and lowering the price before everything has been sold off.

That is not what the option is for. They're buying ~1 billion ripples for a fraction of what they cost.

I understand what an option is...

$10million+ single transactions rarely happen on the orderbook. More like OTC. Bitfinex for example has an OTC window for large transactions.

$50-100m+ transactions probably happen through dinners, multiple meetings, multiple negotiations, etc...

Did you read the article? Ripple wanted out because there were other agreements in the partnership that Ripple claims R3 did not follow through on and they are countersuing for this reason.

how do you know those agreements have any ties with this one.

How do you know there's not? If there was only some sort of legally binding arbitration system we could find out.

The code is the contract! /s

The wording in the article is kind of vague "parallel technology partnership agreement". I have no idea if "parallel" means that the 2 contracts are connected or not. Maybe that's what the court is going to determine.

A contract requires something to be exchanged, there is a minimum of one other thing that has to be connected to this. (I.e. payment for the option)

I read the article, my post was reading through it

That is incredible. The market cap of XRP is almost 8 billion, and having so many coins with a competitor would most likely crush the currency. I'm having difficulty imagining why Ripple would ever give a R3 the option to purchase 5% of coins in circulation, business agreements aside.

The market cap of Ripple (and many of the premined coin/token supplies) is very misleading as often %70 or more of the total supply is in the hands of the founders or an anonymous presale/ICO "purchaser"

i.e. Ripple co-founder owns ~9,000,000,000 Ripple units, and is selling them off en mass:

https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over...

masse :)

But still the public view EOS year long token distribution as a scam

No other business model to distribute tokens besides wasteful mining

There is actually a really interesting dynamic to this option contract. Ripple Labs owns a large amount of Ripples. They own enough to tank the market price and make this contract irrelevant. I'm sure they don't want to do that for other reasons, but the existence of this options contract means they didn't anticipate the price to go up this fast so now they are torn between a)forcing the price down b)accepting this option contract and paying it c)trying to back out of it

It's not clear that Ripple Labs is any worse off honoring the option now than they were; in either case it's a fixed fraction of their holdings.

Edit: Let me explain this again. Let's say the option was exercised last year; Ripple Labs would be out XRP that is now worth ~$1B. Now let's imagine that the option is exercised right now; Ripple Labs would be out ~$1B of XRP. It's the same thing.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/ripple/usd

The Ripples are worth more now. A lot more.

You're focusing on the wrong thing so let me explain again as well...

It's not about the beancounters realising the option is way bad for the issuer, it's management getting cold feet about signing off on 5% and mispricing future trades.

What event made XRP increase by a factor of 50 since March 2017, after years of going nowhere?

They're the only altcoin out there with a real company doing real work to solve a real problem for other real companies.

Proven track record of unproven hype.

Getting added on exchanges, and announcing partnerships with banks mostly

Bitcoin made a new all-time-high, finally crossing over the top from 2013.

I'm a fan of "there is no rational explanation." The other answers seem plausible, but my theory is that if a coin has any kind of value proposition and doesn't completely fail, eventually some speculators will notice that it's a solid investment. The calculus goes like this: When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up.

Why doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

This explanation sounds too simplistic to be true, but whenever you look at the chart, the data seems to suggest it's plausible:

http://i.imgur.com/OU6me1N.png

Notice the volume was completely flatlined up until a huge purchase in March 2017. That massive purchase kickstarted that 50x factor.

These dynamics are independent of any particular coin. So yes, it's true that CoinDuJour might offer some benefits and unique features. But that value proposition is secondary to the overall investment dynamics at play here. It almost doesn't matter what the coin does. As long as it does something different and it's stable, it becomes an attractive target for speculation.

There are a massive number of people with spare ETH and BTC to throw around. They all want to park it somewhere that earns them money. See Pinkapp for a strange phenomenon:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153586

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151292

After they posted that comment, I've been lurking their slack channel. A bunch of people have come in trying to invest in them. So if even pinkapp can generate a >$1M "series A" when it's straight-up illegal, it's clear there's a lot of investment energy floating around.

> When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up. Why doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

That's basically definition of a bubble. 'as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe'? So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

> So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

Hedging, hedging, hedging. There are enough derivatives in the coin world to have a pretty decent portfolio growth, if you're willing to manage it and deal with the tx/transfer fees

But if there is a bubble, hedging coins against each other is probably the worst thing you can do, right?

If you've cashed out your initial investment plus a healthy return, anything left in that portfolio is gravy though, right?

The problem is that they do not hold any value compared to for example a baseball card.

A baseball card has a sentimental value that makes it more valuable then the actual paper it's printed on. Virtual goods can also have sentimental value, like a cool hat in team fortress. Stock shares has a value because of future dividend. A house have value because you can live in it or rent it out. Now think about a crypto currency, it only holds value because someone is willing to buy it, so think about why you want to buy it and what will happen when people want to liquidate their "investment".

Your argument makes sense and I'm not advocating for people to replicate the experience, especially not with the current prices.

My argument merely goes: if you threw away some marginal amount of initial (real) cash at something, and for some reason that something paid you back in full, with bonus and interest, then the price can tank as much as it wants since I'm cashed out.

From there I don't care if 90% of the unit price is pure speculative pressure, as long as I find a counterparty for my trades.

Does this make sense to you, if not why?

I guess you can "day trade" and only own them for a short amount of time. Any suggestion on exchange/marketplaces ? My experience (Bitcoin) is that it's too slow with small volumes. Then there's a lot of risk, like the exchange getting hacked.

Honestly exchanges are a shit show. There used to be a small scene where people traded directly via forums/voice comms but like all good things that's over because of bad actors.

The main issue IMO isn't settlement speed but the ludicrous exchange fees. If you're willing to put some work in I reckon you should be able to "manually" find counterparties for the major altcoins, but to my knowledge there are no decentralised exchanges that offer reasonable liquidity.

It doesn't matter how much you started with, and how much you already took out. As long as you have stuff invested into the coin, you're not cached out - you have value that you could take out of the system that's exposed to the fluctuations.

You're technically correct, but I fail to see how being exposed to the fluctuations on a fraction of disposable income is a bad thing.

It is a crypto bull market. Many alt-crypto did x50-100 in the last couple years.

One big reason is that even though the "market cap" is very high, the vast majority of that "market cap" is locked away and isn't being traded on the market.

The amount of liquid ripple is much smaller than the theoretical amount.

Since Ripple control their coin, they could effectively do a stock split... change the code to give all current ripple holders 1,000,000 coins for each one that they own now.

R3 would still have their option, it would just suddenly be worth much less thanks to the forced inflation :)

Yeah, just do it the fiat way ... ;)

Options don't work that way fortunately/unfortunately. In the event of a split in the underlying, you have to split the options also.

This isn't an inherent property of options. It's just how almost all options contracts are written otherwise they wouldn't hold any value. If this option isn't written that way, then it's feasible.

For stocks, sure. For commodities, it would normally be impossible. For crypto, who knows? As has been said, these cannot have been any standardised form of options, anyway...

Why did they gave that R3 that option? Why? Is that true?

The article makes it sound like in exchange R3 was supposed to give them connections. Paying for things with centrally printed money sounds like a cheap way to get what you need.

Is there any underlying value to anything here? Or is this just penny-stock froth made shiny and new by adding "blockchain" to it?

Damn. I could swear have 100s of 1000s of XRP in an old wallet somewhere... at $0.20/XRP that's some actual money.

woww, ripple had tied up multiple bank like SBI etc.

For anyone that hasn't been following them over the last year or so, they've made amazing inroads into the banking industry.

Exactly, i was looking forward to it.

What do they do in that industry exactly? I never really got the purpose.

Provide a system for inter-bank transfers. Like SWIFT with (theoretically) lower costs and latencies.

Ah, thanks. That's actually a very interesting application for a blockchain, providing settlement services between banks on it.

I've looked into this and I see many banks experimenting but nobody seems to actually use it commercially. Did I miss something?

wonder if they've already gone through arbitration https://ripple.com/terms-of-use/

They have a separate contract, I don't know why you think it would be bound by their terms of use. Contracts nearly always contain language about how disputes will be resolves, and the venue they will be resolved in.

Lateral inhibition /s

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