A year-long conflict over the purchase of five billion XRP tokens between Ripple Labs and R3 Consortium has been settled, according to a press release issued yesterday.

The terms of the agreement “will remain confidential while both sides look forward to putting these disputes behind them,” this notes.

September 2017

The spat began in September 2017 when R3 initiated lawsuit proceedings in Delaware and New York against Ripple Labs. However, the root of the conflict dates back to the summer of 2016, when Ripple’s former CEO Chris Larsen signed the deal with the bank consortium that included the option to purchase the tokens.

R3 claimed that Ripple violated an agreement between the both of them for XRP tokens, including an option enabling the consortium to buy up to five billion Ripple (XRP) tokens at the current price of $0.0085 before the end of next year. Those five billion represent just under 10% of the approximately 55 billion XRP controlled by Ripple. The total supply of Ripple is 100 billion.

The case got thrown out by a Delaware judge in October 2017. R3 then took it to California and New York. Ripple responded with a counterclaim in California, accusing R3 of not complying with various points of the agreement.

When proceedings began a year ago, the value of the agreement was worth over $1 million, but after several months the price of XRP went up, increasing the value of the contract to about $3.85 billion. In January, after the exponential surge of Bitcoin – in December 2017 it reached nearly $20,000 – the five billion XRP were worth $12 billion.

A state appeals court in San Francisco rejected Ripple’s countersuit against the consortium in March 2018. And in June, R3 suggested that the former’s decision to terminate the option to buy was unjustified, claiming the real reason was money.