Here's why Ripple XRP partnerships and MoUs often go nowhere

Over the years, Ripple has announced innumerable XRP partnerships that it ultimately abandoned. Thousands of crypto leaders publish official-looking press releases about preliminary initiatives that generate minimal results. Their primary intention is usually to associate the token with the large brand partner and its “utility.”

Occasionally, those large brands are not even aware that the partnership exists. Helium (HNT), for example, once promised token holders that it had partnerships with Salesforce and Lime scooters that never existed.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ripple’s partnership announcements were not merely innocent attempts at brand-building — to the contrary, Ripple made over $2 billion off XRP sales in large part as it “made an avalanche of public statements” attempting to increase the value of XRP.

According to commissioners, Ripple misused XRP partnerships to sway investors into believing they were making an investment in XRP that might increase in value from the efforts of Ripple.

These included several memorandums of understanding (MoUs); non-binding documents indicating a tentative plan to work together. Often, nothing actually happens after parties sign an MoU. Binance, for example, once had a nonbinding agreement to buy FTX in November 2022. Days later, it abandoned that MoU; FTX went bankrupt.

Here are some examples among hundreds of Ripple (XRP) ‘partnerships’ that have generated minimal usage of XRP.

Early years

On January 29, 2016, Japan-based SBI announced an MoU to work together to develop Ripple Connect. Since then, SBI has published glowing series of press releases naming its various subsidiaries of gaming, banking, and fintech companies — which number in the hundreds. SBI, of course, received equity and XRP from Ripple prior to all of these announcements. None of these announcements occurred without financial incentivization by Ripple.

On April 26, 2018, Ripple announced deals with FairFX, RationalFX, Exchange4Free, UniPAY, and MoneyMax to use RippleNet and the xVia API for payment originators. Out of those four organizations, only MoneyMax mentions Ripple in any capacity.

MoneyGram and other 2019 partnerships

MoneyGram began using XRP Ledger technology in June 2019 in what Ripple called a “strategic partnership.”

In reality, MoneyGram only used XRP technology because Ripple was subsidizing its otherwise unprofitable use. Specifically, Ripple paid MoneyGram tens of millions of dollars in “market development fees” which Moneygram initially booked as revenue and only later reclassified as “contra expenses.”

MoneyGram eventually ended the deal altogether after Ripple stopped paying and the SEC filed its complaint alleging that Ripple offered unregistered securities to US investors.