In a press release earlier today it has emerged that Ripple has reached an agreement with R3 over a legal dispute that dates back to 2017. The two parties appear to be trying to leave the incident in the past but are keeping most of the details confidential.

Ripple and R3 Put Legal Battle Behind Them in Secret Agreement

The legal dispute between Ripple and R3 began around September 2017. The disagreement arose over a deal in which Ripple offered to pay R3 a total of five billion XRP tokens at a considerably reduced price. In exchange for the tokens, R3 would provide Ripple with various key contacts from the banking industry. According to a report in Finder, these may have included huge names such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.

R3 claims that Ripple failed to deliver the XRP tokens, which the latter had agreed to sell for less than one cent each. Ripple countered this by stating that R3 entered into the agreement in bad faith. They went on to state that their competitors had used the deal to appropriate some of their experience to help them to create a product that would offer direct competition to the Ripple payment processing network. They also allege that R3 knew that several key banks that were important for Ripple’s development would “soon be departing from its consortium.”

According to the Finder article, anonymous R3 insiders lend some credence to the claims made by Ripple. They reportedly called R3 as “something like a company of bankers without a bank”. They went on to say that as technology moved on, many members of the R3 consortium found being involved as less attractive due to a “lack of exclusivity.”

It remains unclear when exactly the discussions between the two began last year. However, at the time of the lawsuit, the XRP token was trading above 20 cents. This would have meant that R3 could have sold their payment for over $1 billion. Evidently, those at Ripple felt the contacts that R3 could have provided them were worth such an enormous price.

The legal battle between the two seems to have been resolved now. Precise details of the deal they have reached remain unknown. However, according to a press release dated yesterday, they are now looking to put it behind them:

“R3 HoldCo LLC, R3 LLC, Ripple Labs Inc. and XRP II, LLC announce that they have reached a settlement of all outstanding litigation between the parties. The terms of the agreement will remain confidential and both sides look forward to putting these disputes behind them.”

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