In the wake of multiple reports indicating that the SEC plans to classify Ethereum as a security, Reaper Financial CEO Patrick Riley has taken a subtle shade at the ETH community.
According to an X post today, Riley cleverly twisted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s 2022 tweet to take a swipe at the Ethereum community amid the SEC’s quest to categorize ETH as a security.
In the post, Riley noted that the Ethereum community already forfeited its moral standing to air its grievances about the SEC’s latest crackdown when it sacrificed XRP to monopolize control over the crypto industry through the help of the Democrat Party and corrupt SEC officials.
Ethereum lost their right to complain when they threw $XRP under the bus so they could monopolize crypto through the #Chinese controlled company @WXblockchain with the help of the @DNC and the corrupt @SECGov.#ETHGate https://t.co/z3uZAyuKvr
— PATRICK L. RILEY 🇺🇲 (@PLR_2024) March 21, 2024
Ethereum’s Buterin Made Similar Remarks Against XRP
Riley’s remarks are similar to those made by Buterin in 2022 when he hinted that the Ethereum Foundation holds a grudge against Ripple.
At the time, Buterin suggested that the Ethereum community was not obligated to speak up in support of XRP against the SEC after Ripple named it “China-controlled” in the lawsuit.
Although XRP community members had already slammed Buterin for taking a swipe at the asset, Riley brought up the tweet again as the SEC moved to place ETH under its jurisdiction.
Unending Hostilities Between XRP and ETH
It bears mentioning that the Ethereum and XRP communities have been at loggerheads for years. Both assets were involved in stiff competition in 2017 regarding which crypto asset will rank behind Bitcoin as the second-largest by market capitalization.
Notably, Ethereum received a major boost in the form of partial clarity in June 2018. At the time, former director of SEC’s Corporation Finance division Bill Hinman declared the asset as a non-security. Hinman’s declaration about ETH gave the asset an edge over XRP.
In 2020, the SEC further cemented ETH’s position as the second-largest cryptocurrency after it charged Ripple with raising $1.3 billion in unregistered securities sales of XRP.
Since the lawsuit was introduced, XRP community members speculated that the legal tussle was engineered by its major rival, Ethereum, with the help of “corrupt SEC officials.”
Before joining the SEC, Hinman was a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, a member of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)- an organization responsible for marketing Ethereum as an enterprise solution.
Interestingly, Hinman still met with Simpson Thacher staff while working at the SEC. He also received millions of dollars in profit sharing from the company.
With the SEC pushing a legal campaign to label ETH as a security, some XRP community members believe the move is a step in the right direction.
However, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks otherwise. The prominent crypto stakeholder speculated that the SEC would lose the war to categorize ETH as a security, as it did against XRP.
