The article about preposterous “hostile takeover of a top 10 cryptocurrency” by a project called Valor appeared on the axios.com website.
The author, Dan Primack who was publicly called out by Ripple CEO and CTO for his writing, illuminates how a certain project run by unknown entrepreneur Vishal Harpalani, that is called Valor has a menacing plan of devastating XRP ledger by massively shorting XRP token only to fork it and create new Valor ledger in its place.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse reprimanded the author with a call for more professionalism and benevolence in the media covering crypto sector:
David Schwartz, the brain behind the XRP ledger sneered at the idea while pointing out that something like this is technically not possible:
The whole idea is amateurish and, as Schwartz highlighted, pretty amusing.
Read: How to buy XRP
Background: Valor was originally launched in late 2017 by Vishal Harpalani, who previously spent three years working with early Ripple investor Flight Ventures (led by Gil Penchina).
- Harpalani’s original plan was to raise $160 million via an initial coin offering for a new cryptocurrency that would become a widely distributed source of stored value in developing countries.
- It also would partner with mobile wallets and mobile carriers that do business with the underbanked, thus helping Valor achieve network effects (and lower the switching costs from fiat currencies).
- But the plan wasn’t a hit with investors. Harpalani maintained the basic aims of Valor, but decided the better means would be to effectively execute a hostile takeover of XRP.
How it would work:
- Valor wants to raise “tens of millions” of dollars to short XRP, thus driving down the price. This would be done via a debt instrument, not an ICO.
- It would then create a “fork,” or clone, of XRP’s network whereby willing XRP holders (except for Ripple) would receive one Valor token for every XRP token.
- Valor would then redistribute extra Valor to its community and incentivize holders to exchange even more of their now-devalued XRP. Basically, force a capital flight.
