Japan’s SBI Clears XRP Rumors, Says $4B Stake Is in Ripple Labs Not Tokens

Japanese digital asset firm SBI Holdings has come out to debunk rumors of the company holding billions in XRP. They further shared that their investment is in Ripple Labs instead of the altcoin as claimed.

SBI Denies $10B XRP Holdings Claims

CEO Yoshitaka Kitao has corrected the misleading information that the company holds $10 billion in XRP. He explained that the actual bet is from the company’s large equity stake in Ripple Labs.

The confusion started when an X user named Ledger Man praised the company for its expansion of the crypto business in Singapore through the acquisition of Coinhako. The part that really grabbed people’s attention was the statement that SBI Holdings owns $10 billion in the Ripple token.

Kitao immediately responded to the post and corrected the misleading information. He explained that SBI Holdings does not own $10 billion in XRP. The company actually owns a 9% equity stake in Ripple Labs.

“Not $10 bil. in XRP, but around 9% of Ripple Lab. So our hidden asset could be much bigger,” Kitao said.

As of now, the company’s valuation is almost $50 billion. This comes after Ripple raised $500 million in funding. Based on this, SBI’s 9% stake in Ripple is estimated to be worth around $4 billion.

However, if the valuation of the firm were to go up substantially, especially in the manner that Garlinghouse has projected in the long term, then the equity stake of SBI could go up accordingly.

The SBI Holdings and Ripple collaboration has also been one of the most successful partnerships that has contributed to the adoption of XRP worldwide. Kitao also indicated that the value of SBI’s stake in Ripple could increase in the future.

Crypto Firms Expand Into XRP Yield Offerings

Last December, SBI Ripple Asia partnered with Doppler Finance through a memorandum of understanding to explore yield products on the XRP Ledger and real-world asset tokenization.

The partnership aims at developing institutional-grade yield infrastructure for XRP and SBI Holdings investors. This could also increase the adoption of real-world assets on the blockchain.

This follows a proposal by a Ripple dev to implement staking on the XRP Ledger. The dev proposed the idea to explore how rewards can be integrated into the system in the future.

Flare has announced that it has joined Morpho and Mystic to launch modular lending. The network has also taken other initiatives to improve DeFi plans for XRP users, including staking on Fireflight and yield tokenization on Spectra.