AMC

The Ripple boss claims his company was unfairly treated which has given Ethereum the edge.

Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse has been airing his thoughts over the state of the crypto market and regulations, and a grudge over the financial regulator’s approach to Ethereum appears to have surfaced.

Speaking at the DC Fintech Week virtual conference on Oct. 21, the Ripple boss declared that Ethereum had been granted a regulatory green light that enabled it to surpass his company’s XRP token.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been pursuing Ripple over claims that XRP is an unregistered security. In January, Ripple filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the SEC demanding to know why it didn’t consider ETH a security. Six months later in July, a district judge allowed the company to depose a former SEC official who declared in 2018 that ETH was not a security.

Garlinghouse clearly feels that his firm has been hard done by and Ethereum’s subsequent success is at least in part down to more favorable treatment by the SEC. He stated that it is affecting the market, adding:

“Within the last few years, XRP was the second most valuable digital asset. As it became clear the SEC had given a hall pass to ETH, ETH obviously has kind of exploded and that clarity has helped.”

XRP was the second largest crypto asset by market capitalization in late December, 2017. It has currently slipped to seventh place while Ethereum has held the second spot ever since.

Garlinghouse also stated that the SEC has been taking an aggressive posture against crypto with recent actions against his own company and Coinbase. Commenting on Ripple’s battle with the financial regulator, he said that the SEC claims to be protecting consumers but:

“You have nearly 50,000 U.S. people who hold XRP who are trying to sue the SEC for ‘protecting them’.”

Earlier this month a U.S. district judge ruled that individuals holding the company’s XRP token could not participate as defendants in the lawsuit.

Related: XRP purchasers back Ripple, arguing that it is not a security

The SEC’s request to extend the deadline to complete discovery in its ongoing lawsuit with Ripple Labs and its executives has been granted and pushed to Jan. 14, 2022.

Ripple claims that any further delay in resolving this case will “cause serious harm to the interests of the defendants and XRP holders.”

The court acknowledged this but stated that the “additional time sought by the SEC will not affect the schedule to resolve the case.”

The AMC boss said that there are many reasons why the company could issue its own cryptocurrency.

American multinational entertainment giant AMC is getting very excited about blockchain and the company’s chief executive is publicly mulling the issuance of its own cryptocurrency.

During an interview with CNBC on Oct. 20, AMC chief executive Adam Aron discussed the firm’s crypto ambitions. There were no solid details but the company boss did make some revealing comments.

“We’ve made a lot of noise in the last few months about getting hyperactive in cryptocurrency.”

He then canvassed the possibility of AMC issuing its own coin, stating: “There are a lot of reasons why AMC could be a successful issuer of cryptocurrency as well as a redeemer of cryptocurrency.” He added that this was just one of half a dozen ideas the company is working on at the moment.

AMC is very forward-looking with regards to digital assets. In August, the firm stated that it intended to have the infrastructure in place to accept Bitcoin payments for movie tickets by the end of this year.

The following month, the theater giant expanded on those crypto payment options by including Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. At the time, Aron commented that moviegoers were keen to use crypto as a payment method for their tickets and concessions at AMC theatres.

In early October, AMC added Dogecoin to the list of crypto payment options following a Twitter poll that Aron created that resulted in 68% voting for DOGE from more than 140,000 participants.

I sincerely want to hear your opinion, via this Twitter Poll. By year-end 2021, AMC will take Bitcoin, Etherum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash for online payments. I hear from many on my Twitter feed we should accept Dogecoin too. Do you think AMC should explore accepting Dogecoin?

— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) September 21, 2021

On Oct. 6, the company announced digital gift cards that can be purchased with crypto and redeemed for tickets and AMC e-card purchases.

Related: AMC Theatres debuts crypto payments for e-gift card purchases

Token issuance for listed companies in the U.S. may be no easy task with ever-increasing regulatory hurdles to overcome. Social media giant Facebook is finding this out the hard way as the scrutiny directed towards its cryptocurrency issuance plans continues to mount.

AMC shot to fame among momentum investors earlier this year when share prices surged after becoming a meme stock favored by retail traders on Reddit’s infamous WallStreetBets forum. At the time of writing AMC shares were trading at $40.86, down marginally on the week, but up 6.2% since the beginning of October.