Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings has announced it’s adding XRP to its cryptocurrency lending service, which allows users to earn an annual interest rate on their cryptocurrency holdings for supported cryptoassets.
The feature, VCTrade Lending, has been supporting bitcoin with an annual interest rate of 1% since November of last year, and could in the future add the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization ether.
In a new announcement, SBI has revealed users can now deposit XRP into the platform to earn 0.1% per year on their holdings of the cryptocurrency. The minimum deposit amount is 1,000 XRP, worth over $390 at press time, and the maximum deposit amount is 100,000 XRP, worth over $39,000, according to CryptoCompare data.
The announcement reads:
VC Trade Lending is a service that allows customers to rent out their crypto assets to the company and receive interest rewards according to the quantity and duration of the crypto assets.
While the rate for XRP is significantly lower than the rate for BTC, it shows how the company is still supporting the token, which has been under fire after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it had “filed an action against Ripple Labs Inc. and two of its executives, who are also significant security holders, alleging that they raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”
Japan’s top securities watchdog, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) has reportedly said it does not consider XRP to be a security, arguing the token does not meet the definition of a security under Japanese law, however.
The SEC’s lawsuit has been widely criticized. While most crypto exchanges delisted XRP in response to the lawsuit, others have sided with Ripple, arguing that the SEC’s move hurt XRP investors.
Crypto exchange Uphold pointed out that the SEC’s goal is to protect consumers, and believes it’s hard to see “how a judgment rendering XRP essentially worthless and inflicting billions of dollars of losses on retail investors” would square with that goal.
Featured image via Pixabay.
