Ripple Labs Inc. will not be able to settle its high-profile legal clash with blockchain rival R3 Holdco in California. Instead, the cryptocurrency company will have to resolve its issue with R3 in New York City.

Battle of Blockchain Developers

A San Francisco state appeals court has denied Ripple’s efforts to hurry an appeal which would settle a lawsuit against R3 Holdco. However, the lawsuit will likely be resolved in a court in New York court, something Ripple is not very happy about, saying that the company would likely face “irreparable injury.”

The dispute between the two major blockchain developers has gone on for quite some time now, and the appeals court’s decision is only going to prolong the conflict. Ripple and R3 have been fighting over more than $1 billion worth of virtual currency options since September 2017, reported Bloomberg.

The clash initially started when R3, a well-established blockchain start-up which has more than 100 firms, filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs Inc. Ripple is accused of failing to respecting an agreement which would’ve given R3 rightful claim of an estimated $1 billion in XRP. Ripple also retaliated with a lawsuit of its own, claiming that R3 failed to respect other agreements.

The denial of Ripple’s appeal in San Francisco doesn’t sit particularly well with the company, as it means that it will have to settle the dispute in New York City, R3’s home base. The current state of their relationship is a 180 degree shift from the days in which the two companies where in collaboration. They have progressively become hostile competitors as they try to monopolize the same customer sector.

This news comes after a recent claim made by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s, saying that Bitcoin “is the Napster of digital assets.”

“Some may look back at Bitcoin and say that it is the Napster of digital assets. What I mean by that is that Napster was the first to digitize music and demonstrate that you can do a lot of cool things with that. But ultimately they were circumventing trademark laws, they were circumventing royalty payments and then government stepped in and Napster wasn’t successful. But Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora were successful,” said Garlinghouse.

Garlinghouse omits to point out that Napster, just like Ripple, was obligated to face legal retaliation in a court of law. Whereas bitcoin is practically un-suable, seeing as the project is an actual cryptocurrency, meaning that it benefits from proper decentralization.