Bitcoin Daily: SoftBank To Invest $75M In PayPal Co-Founder-Backed Crypto Exchange Bullish; Judge Lets Ripple Question Ex-SEC Director In XRP Case

SB Northstar, which is an investment arm for SoftBank, has agreed to an investment of $75 million in Bullish, the Block.one subsidiary crypto exchange, CoinDesk writes.

Bullish has been valued at $9 billion. The company is set to go public before the year’s end. It will be done through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Far Peak Acquisition.

Bullish’s decision to go public hasn’t been met by praise by all — some are skeptical, including billionaire crypto investor Sam Bankman-Fried, who has said he thinks Bullish’s real goal is to raise the value of its Block.one-associated EOS blockchain.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says SoftBank plans to buy 7.5 million shares for $10 each, once Bullish completes its SPAC merger.

Bullish is backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, along with crypto firms like Galaxy Digital.

Ripple, fighting a lawsuit about its alleged misleading of investors, will be allowed to question an ex-Securities and Exchange Commission official on that agency’s policy decisions, Bloomberg writes.

Ripple will now be allowed to depose William H. Hinman, former SEC Division of Corporate Finance division. They want him to give testimony on the agency’s processes for arriving at policy decisions.

Ripple, co-founder Christian Larsen and Chief Executive Officer Bradley Garlinghouse were all targets of the SEC suit last year. The suit alleged that the parties had worked to create an environment where XRP entered a market in which the information available was limited based on what they’d chosen to share.

The two men, according to the SEC, personally profited by around $600 million and had been ignoring legal advice that XRP could be considered an investment contract and thus a security, so the two men had been selling virtual tokens without registering them.

Ripple has countered before that XRP isn’t a security — the company says it’s a medium of exchange and is used as a virtual currency in international and domestic transactions.