Ripple is scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to make it look like someone is using its “technology”. Its “partnerships” are nothing but non-binding promises of maybe one day have a look at its platform, and the “financial institutions” that supposedly use Ripple are just one-page websites without a product.

Let’s have a look at one of the latest grandstanding claims that RippleNet is used by over 200 financial institutions:

With 2,100 retweets and 4,600 likes, the post has certainly made its way into the hapless XRP bagholder community. Let’s look at how Ripple backs its impressive claim.

Ripple […] announced today that 13 new financial institutions have signed up for the company’s payment network, RippleNet. The companies include Euro Exim BankSendFriendJNFXFTCSAhli Bank of KuwaitTranspaygoBFC BahrainConnectPayGMTWorldCom FinanceOlympia Trust CompanyPontual/USEND and Rendimento

Cool. Let’s have a look at these “financial institutions”.

I won’t dissect Euro Exim Bank - the fact that it’s not a real bank has already been demonstrated by Frances Coppola (Ripple Has Signed Up A Bank To Use XRP For Payments. So What?).

SendFriend

What about SendFriend? Their website is just one landing page without any links, that only allows you to “set up an account”. Let’s try to do that, shall we?

Setting up an account at SendFriend to experience the finance of tomorrow, powered by Ripple

After clicking on “Submit”, I’m redirected to the second and last webpage of this burgeoning financial institution, which looks like this:

I can’t wait!

Damn. Apparently SendFriend is nothing but a couple of webpages a ten-year-old could have pieced together over a day or two. But, hey, a lot of startups have to start somewhere, let’s assume SendFriend is just hard at work on their beta.

What about JNFX?

JNFX

JNFX was founded, as is claimed on its website, and confirmed by UK company listings, back in 2007, “in the heart of the City”. This appears to be their main selling point, as the reference to their geographical location comes up everywhere on their website. So much so, that I had to check for myself.

Their postal address (emphasis on “postal”) is 68 Lombard Street, London, which happens to be an address shared by hundreds of other companies. Because it’s a virtual office - this “financial institution” can’t even afford its own office. You can’t make this up.

Digging in a little deeper, Mr Nathan Samuel Eisenberg, JNFX’s director, is a also the company’s secretary. Despite various award claims proudly displayed on the company’s webpage, its balance sheet and income statements have flatlined at zero since its incorporation in 2007.

Fake office, no revenue, certainly a great catch who will bring a lot of value into the Ripple ecosystem!

What about the next “client”, FTCS?

Financial Transaction Control Systems

FTCS AB is a Swedish fintech startup who has developed an e-wallet called Intergiro. I tried to set up a corporate account on Intergiro up until the moment they sent a verification SMS to my mobile phone number, which I couldn’t access at the moment.

Digging a little bit deeper, I managed to find a report from a VC fund, who were unlucky enough to invest into FTCS, and kept throwing in good money after bad, hoping for a miracle. The report revealed that FTCS had a turnover of $1M in 2017 (which is, for a remittance service, a joke), along with $1M in losses. Nobody uses them.

From the looks of it, FTCS is just one of the hundreds of dying Fintech startups with no traction or hope to get real customers, ready to do anything in order to survive a few more months. Easy prey for Ripple’s sales force.

Ahli Bank of Kuwait

I simply couldn’t find any information about this partnership, other than Ripple’s own press release. If it looks anything like Ripple’s deal with Mitsubishi UFJ, it’s no more than a dream painted with a stick on water:

A “Memorandum of Understanding”, for the XRP bagholders who still hope for a miracle, is a nothing. It’s a non-binding agreement, something businesses sign when they don’t want to do something, but don’t want to look like they don’t want to do it. It’s also a follow-up on Ripple’s fabulous 2017 partnership deal with MUFJ - a lot of promises with nothing material at the end.

Transpaygo

Transpaygo is an Austrian e-payments startup whose main claim is to have 78k page views per month. A quick check with Similarweb reveals that’s very, very generous.

I didn’t want to go through the corporate account KYC process, so I clicked instead on the “Not a company” link in their menu. I was redirected to fonmoney.com, a subsidiary.

Fonmoney, a subsidiary of Transpaygo

All right, let’s try to “send money” then, this is what we’re here for, after all.

Oops

That’s right, Ripple. Your client, a “financial institution” focusing on sending money over the Internet, doesn’t have a webpage for sending money over the Internet.

Ripple’s Client Ecosystem Is A Sea Of Bullshit

At this point, I gave up. Not a single one of Ripple’s clients appears to be real, or an actual client.

Ripple has sold over half a billion US dollars worth of XRP coins to clueless bagholders. With that kind of money, it could create 200 real financial institutions out of thin air, sign them all up as clients, and make claims that couldn’t be debunked using just a modicum of common sense.

I guess nobody really cares double-checking Ripple’s claims, and just hopes the next crypto bull run will bring in another wave of dumb money who will bail everyone out.

Good luck with that.

Aftermath

I got a lot of heat from Ripple’s fanboys and Twitter bots, who accused me of cherry-picking the noise and ignoring the legitimate heavyweights among Ripple’s list of clients. My answer to them took the form of this post: “Ripple’s Lie About Its Santander Partnership“.

Join the Conversation

27 Comments

  1. Nice investigation, sadly no one will care.

    I did something similar with Stellar. I got from their website ( https://www.stellar.org/about/directory ) a bunch of companies and then I mailed all of them how they use Stellar.

    Most did not reply and some of them replied that they were testing to use the Stellar network privately but none of them are close to what the final implementation should like and they have a lot of work to do. None of those companies mentioned that they wanted to use the Public Stellar Network.

    Both XRP and XLM are a scam that will hopefully will be investigated into.

    1. Article about the Santander lie coming, stay tuned. I’m only one man without ressources, you can’t reasonably expect me to keep up with Ripple’s lie machine funded by selling billions of worthless magical virtual coins to clueless bagholders.

  2. Amazing. Can you dig into the other 197 other institutions, if you have time to google them and make sure they have a webpage? I’m sure you could blow this thing wide open and get some serious exposure detailing this heinous fraud I would only equal to the Fyre festival scandal. Keep exposing the truth.

  3. A good article for many XRP holders to see the truth! I would like to convey the content of the article to a stupid XRP holder in Japan. Would you allow me to translate it to Japanese and publish it?

  4. Good article. The fact that their company is a US company aswell just puts them in big shit. People will go to jail.

    1. Damn, you got me. I’ll delete this post immediately, and replace it with a list of 200 partners of my blog, with dates and links to Twitter profiles to prove that the partnerships are real.

  5. You can reply with smug ignorance all you want, but just to let you know, it’s clear to all intelligent people (not your target market, I know) that you have not done your research.

    Look up “due diligence”.

  6. One very important thing to remember is that there are two Ripples. One part is developing cool technology for payments and is totally separate from the XRP cryptobubble.

  7. What an absolute load of shite. too many faults to even start. When you want to change a global system you have to start small . What do you want ? Take over huge global fi over night . You need to learn a lot more, obviously before you should speak out loud. Shh! When your more knowledgeable you can speak until then watch and learn . 🧐

  8. Well if this doesn’t come across as a salty hit piece attempt. Hey, at least you tried…

  9. We are working with them. 😊
    Don‘t spread this lies to the world.

    Listen people. I confirm that the Deutsche Bank is working with Ripple!!!

    1. Working with Ripple is nice. A lot of people are working with Ripple and signing partnerships. I’ve never denied that. What I’m questioning is the scope of their partnerships. If you work with Ripple at Deutsche Bank, maybe you can give us some figures that would help us understand if it’s just just one more proof-of-concept experiment that will lead nowhere, or if DB is actually using Ripple’s technology for something useful?

  10. I work for ripple (engineering) and I strongly deny your claim.
    We see real volume everyday (and its growing faster than u think, u can check our quarterly reports)

    Please don’t spread rumor without going into details. You can reach out to PR and they would be more than happy to provide you details of our real human customers (to solve your your limited resources problem)

  11. I work in fintech.
    You seem to have cherry picked some of Ripples start-ups.
    I can assure you Ripple are the real deal. They are 2 years ahead of the competition.
    This argument is moot in any case. By March end I predict you’ll be eating your words:)

    1. Maybe you’d care enough to provide some verifiable facts to back up what you’re saying?

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