Update (October 13): On Friday, a Warburg Pincus representative reached out to Finbold to clarify, stating, “Warburg Pincus is not an investor in Genesis.”
Not long after the Israeli police seized cryptocurrency wallets allegedly linked to Hamas following the weekend terrorist attack, the cryptocurrency community has raised concerns over the United States government’s mentions of Ripple and XRP in connection with terror financing.
As it happens, the US Department of State’s statement on cryptocurrencies and their potential use by criminals, including terrorist groups, contains specific mentions of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ripple, i.e. XRP, over which the XRP community members, particularly wEeZiE, a.k.a. NerdNationUnbox, have shared their displeasure on October 13.
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Controversial statements
Specifically, the controversial part of the government statement reads that:
“Terrorist financiers and other criminals use the formal financial system, new payment methods such as bitcoin and Ripple, traditional methods of value transfer such as hawala, trade-based money-laundering, and cash couriers.”
In response to these allegations, the X user stated that the government always mentions Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) when talking about cryptocurrencies, except “when you’re trying to trash the industry, then you mention ‘Ripple.’”
On top of that, wEeZiE made the connection between the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and crypto investment firm Genesis, pointing out that Blinken’s father has co-founded global private equity firm Warburg Pincus, “who is 1 of 2 investors in Genesis how bizarre”. However, later on Friday Warburg Pincus representative reached out to Finbold to clarify that “Warburg Pincus is not an investor in Genesis”.
Indeed, Genesis has received a lot of flak over its involvement in multiple scandals and has recently announced the suspension of customer withdrawals following the settlement to pay $175 million to Alameda Research, affiliated with the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, raising objections from various parties.
As a reminder, the Israeli police were able to freeze and seize Binance crypto accounts supposedly linked to Hamas and used in financing the terror group’s activities, Finbold reported on October 10. In March, the US Commodities Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Binance’s CEO over accusations of allowing Hamas to conduct transactions on his platform.
Meanwhile, the XRP token was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.48, up 0.92% in the last 24 hours, down 7.1% across the previous seven days, and gaining 0.46% on its monthly chart, as per the most recent data on October 13.
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