Craig Wright Says SBI Chairman Yoshitaka Kitao & Others Were Gifted Millions In XRP For "Using And Promoting" Ripple Blockchain

The chairman of Softbank Group Corp. SFTBY spin-off SBI Holdings Ltd. SBHGF, Yoshitaka Kitao received $60 million in XRP XRP/USD tokens as compensation for “using and promoting” Ripple according to Craig Wright, the founder of cryptocurrency Bitcoin SV (CRYPTO: BSV).

“Kitao-san has been slowly spending the 60 million US dollars worth of tokens he was gifted. They still have some. There are absolutely no plans to implement anything. I understand why he's doing it. For the chairman of SBI $60 million to shut up and tell people that you're running things is a significant investment with no downside,” Wright said in an e-mail exchange. 

“Personally, I wish executives [at these] types of firms would be more honest. I like Kitao, but I don't like the general attitude that is taken to the truth and ignoring how it doesn't seem to matter only impacts other people. But for $60 million you get a lot of leeway. I discussed this in one of the Japanese clubs where I had a dinner with him [Kitao] and his wife and my wife.”

Kitao, who was a board member of Ripple Labs Inc. until last year, told crypto journal Coinpost in 2019 that “every bank in Japan will use XRP by 2025.” He added that SBI was working on persuading Japanese banks to use the digital currency for cross-border remittances in time for the six-month-long Osaka Expo from May to November that year.

Wright said that Ripple had no plans to implement any genuine banking industry developments in its product pipeline. 

“As for innovation, they [Ripple] have no idea how. They don't build anything. All of these solutions are copies of other people's code and none of them are implemented correctly,” he said.

Despite no longer being a board member of Ripple, Kitao remains a strong supporter of XRP. In July Kitao shared news of Ripple’s partial win against the SEC on his X account in which it was ruled that secondary market trades in XRP did not constitute securities sales but sales to institutions may do.

Kitao said in June that Ripple would likely file for an IPO if it won against the SEC at trial.  

“If the conclusion is reached and XRP is a coin, I think it will be a very expensive price. If the conclusion (of the trial) is positive, I think the management will immediately go public,” Kitao said.

Wright added that Jesse Powell, the founder of US digital currency exchange Kraken, was another beneficiary of XRP tokens.

“One of the main people [involved] is Jesse of Kraken and previously Mt Gox fame,” said Wright.

Powell was one of the first seed investors in Ripple when Jed McCaleb founded the company around a decade ago. Powell resigned from Ripple’s board of directors in 2014 after McCaleb handed himself and two of his colleagues what was then 20% of the XRP token supply and subsequently resigned.

“I’m no longer confident in the management nor the company’s ability to recover from the founders’ perplexing allocation to themselves of 20% of the XRP, which I had hoped until recently would be returned,” Powell wrote on a message posted on Reddit at the time. “While I care about the people who work there and I wish the company the best, I cannot personally continue to support the business.”

Kraken suspended trading of XRP in March 2021 after the US Securities & Exchange Commission filed suit against the company, but it re-listed the digital currency again in 2022.

Powell recently announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Kraken and taking a more product-oriented role at the exchange. “I don't like that I'm going out at the bottom of the market. It would have been nice to bow out six months ago and take credit for the full rise to the top,” Powell told Blockchain news site Protocol last September.  

Wright was critical of the incestuous nature of Digital Currency Group-owned Blockchain media outlets such as CoinDesk and the venture capital funds invested in cryptocurrencies for not giving a him proper hearing on the topic.

“What annoys me most is that I don't get one round telling people about what I know publicly. Kitao won't deny it but he also wouldn't admit it,” said Wright. 

Neither SBI or Kraken responded to requests for comment on this story.