On Thursday (February 6), Mike Novogratz, a former Goldman Sachs partner, as well as Founder and CEO of crypto-focused merchant bank Galaxy Digital, had some nice things to say about Ripple, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and the digital asset XRP a day after getting roasted by the Ripple CEO for his negative comments about Ripple and XRP during the previous week.
Here is the timeline for this drama.
On Thursday (February 5), Coindesk reported that it had discovered — through a leaked recording — that last week, at TD Ameritrade’s National LINC 2020 conference (in Orlando, Florida), at the end of a discussion onstage with Ric Edelman, Novogratz had made some comments that were highly critical of Ripple (even though Galaxy Digital is a large investor in Ripple Labs).
Following this discussion, apparently, Novogratz took questions from the audience, and the last question was about his opinion of XRP.
Per Coindesk’s report, Here are a few things that Novogratz said at that event about Ripple and XRP:
“Ripple the company owns 60 billion of the coins, of the XRP. That’s a lot of it… When I’m buying a stock, if I know [someone’s] selling $10 billion-worth of it at some price, it makes me less excited to buy the stock…”
As for XRP, alledgedly this is what Novogratz had to say about it:
“It did underperform immensely last year. I think it will underperform immensely again this year and it’s just because of the supply.”
Shortly after Coindesk’s report came out, Garlinghouse pointed out via Twitter that XRP is outperforming Bitcoin in 2020:
Ahem… IS THIS THING ON… can I get a fact check on aisle CoinDesk?
XRP has outperformed BTC and the broader crypto market in 2020. XRP is up 44% (19.1 to 27.5) vs BTC's 33% (7,100 to 9,500) so far this year.#factsmatter https://t.co/KAdFqD93t1
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) February 5, 2020
Also..this is the same guy that said bitcoin will go to 20K in 2019 ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ #notNostradamus
He did predict Tom Hanks would win an Oscar for Mr. Rogers – maybe this is the prediction he’ll get right? Personally voting for Brad Pitt though!
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) February 5, 2020
This prompted Novogratz to come to Twitter late last night and explain though a series of tweets his alleged criticism of Ripple and XRP:
1. GLXY is a big investor in Ripple Labs. I would like to see them do well. @bgarlinghouse has done a great job as ceo. I commented the XRP tokens underperformed $btc last year because Ripple owns a lot of them. I have been almost solely long $btc for the past 15 months.
— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz) February 6, 2020
2. This year the broader alt market, including $XRP has outperformed $BTC. This has surprised me. That said, I see more and more large accounts getting educated and set up to be accumulators of $BTC snd believe on a risk adjusted basis it’s the best place to bet on crypto.
— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz) February 6, 2020
3. $BTC has found a place as a weapon in macro portfolios as digital gold – a hard asset. All other crypto’s are venture bets and will only have lasting value if they become a product that is useful. $eth might be the trust level people build on. If it does, it’s a great bet.
— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz) February 6, 2020
The gist of his latest comments is that he is very bullish on Bitcoin due to its store of value use case (since he sees Bitcoin as digital gold) and he does not believe that any of the other cryptoassets have yet proved their use cases. In other words, he did not mean to single out XRP among the altcoins. He also made it clear that his company (Galaxy Digital) is a major investor in Ripple, that he respects Garlinghouse’s leadership, and it is in his interest for Ripple to succeed in its mission.
Understandbly, the XRP community feels that Novogratz’s attack on Ripple and XRP was in no way justified, and this “explanation” by Novogratz will probably not be seen as sufficient for undoing any damage that the reputation of Ripple may have suffered as a result of the comments he alledgedly made last week.
One prominent member of the crypto community, the host of the highly popular YouTube Channel “Crypto Eri”, pointed out to Novogratz that he needs to do a lot better than a few tweets to make it up to Ripple:
You really owe it to the entire @Ripple Team to have dedicated articles written by multiple high profile medias to clear up your lapse of clear thinking/speaking. A few lines in a tweet doesn't suffice.
— CryptoEri (@sentosumosaba) February 6, 2020
