Blockchain payments company Ripple continues to take damage as more institutions steer clear of the popular altcoin XRP. The latest to ditch XRP is Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest cryptocurrency asset manager. The recent announcement from the asset manager has revealed that the institution has liquidated all its XRP holdings and used the funds to buy more Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC).
The move will affect Grayscale’s Digital Large Cap Fund, an asset that provides exposure to the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Grayscale sold its XRP on Monday, a week after Genesis Global Trading, the fund’s authorized participant, announced it would soon temporarily suspend XRP trading.
The decision came as a response in the wake of a looming legal battle between Ripple and the US SEC. As of now, Genesis Global Trading plans to halt all XRP transactions on January 15.
Before Grayscale liquidated all its XRP holdings, it accounted for roughly 1.46% of the Digital Large Cap Fund. Now, the fund constitutes 81.63% BTC, 15.86% Ether (ETH), 1.08% BCH, and 1.43% LTC. Each share represented 0.00047489 BTC, 0.00287011 ETH, 0.00047537 BCH and 0.00167314 LTC.
This has also been confirmed by Grayscale with a series of tweets. The firm noted that the decision was taken “following DLC Fund’s Quarterly Review (12/31/20).” It added that no other asset qualified for inclusion in the fund.
Grayscale has been a major player when it comes to driving up institutional demand for cryptocurrencies. The total amount of assets under its management recently surpassed $20 billion, with data analysis resource Coin98 Analytics stating that the firm bought three times more BTC than the amount that was mined in December.
The asset manager isn’t the only institution that has ditched XRP. Over the past weeks, several major exchanges operating in the United States have announced that they would delist XRP in the near future.
XRP community takes action
Meanwhile, some of the members of the XRP community have filed a petition in a US court in an attempt to force the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to exclude its claim that tokens owned by investors are securities.
Some investors have also criticized SEC Chairman Jay Clayton for not being able to protect investors, because the price of XRP has crashed, resulting in heavy losses for many. The petition adds:
“As chairman of the SEC, it was Jay Clayton’s (Clayton) fiduciary duty to enforce the SEC mission statement. Instead of protecting investors and sharing information to help investors make informed decisions the respondent knowingly and intentionally caused multibillion-dollar losses to innocent investors who have purchased, exchanged, received and/or acquired the digital asset XRP, including the named petitioners, and all others similarly situated.”
