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Dr. Artur Kirjakulov, CEO and founder of XPMarket, has said this publicly accused Bitstamp performing a “back pull” against the XRP community. This serious accusation has sparked a controversial debate among industry stakeholders, raising questions about the stability and reliability of Bitstamp’s involvement in XRPL-based financial instruments.
Has Bitstamp Rug Pulled Out of the XRP Community?
On Sunday, November 17, Dr. Kirjakulov to X to express his concerns about Bitstamp’s recent actions. “Bitstamp literally just pulled out of the and unannounced maneuver. leaving the XRPL community in a precarious position.
According to Kirjakulov, the lack of a formal statement from Bitstamp or RippleX increases the uncertainty surrounding this liquidity drain, potentially leading to “extremely volatile” trading conditions and significant price impacts for these asset pairs.
Dr. Kirjakulov further highlighted the complicated relationship between Ripple and Bitstamp, noting that “Ripple owns an equity stake in Bitstamp.” This connection suggests that Ripple’s stake in Bitstamp could influence the exchange’s strategic decisions within the XRPL space. XPMarket’s CEO expressed deep concerns about the assurance of a 1:1 conversion rate for packaged assets issued by Bitstamp, drawing a parallel to the Stably incident where such guarantees were not honored. He emphasized: “How can anyone trust DeFi on XRPL if official partners are taking such steps? Optics are terrible.”
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The accusations did not go unnoticed within the XRPL community. Daniel Keller, CTO at Eminence and ambassador of XRPL, was skeptical about the authenticity of Kirjakulov’s claims. Keller questioned the legitimacy of the accounts linked to the liquidity pools, saying, “Do we know this is an official Bitstamp account? Looking back at the activation sequence, it was activated through Binance, which is weird if Bitstamp runs it.”
In response, Dr. claimed Kirjakulov that the accounts in question were indeed connected to Bitstamp. He clarified: “If you go through the accounts, it is visible that they are clearly associated with Bitstamp as they also market these tokens. There is literally no one else here interested in creating these tokens on the market because they are niche and unpopular.”
He further explained that liquidity had been withdrawn to a market making (MM) account, reinforcing his claim of Bitstamp’s direct involvement. Kirjakulov also dismissed the importance of activation accounts, noting: “Activation accounts mean nothing. I activate my account from multiple exchanges specifically to make it less traceable.”
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Keller pushed for more concrete evidence to support the claims. He asked, “Can you share some of these connecting trades because if you’ve already looked them up it would be cool to share. An activation account is very important if you are an exchange supporting an LP because you want people to know it is your company.
Dr. Kirjakulov responded by emphasizing the strength of the circumstantial evidence pointing towards Bitstamp, saying: “Circumstantial evidence? Yes. But this evidence points pretty clearly to Bitstamp as no one else has such a large number of these assets issued by them except someone affiliated with them. And circumstantial evidence is no excuse to ignore them.”
The discourse extended to the topic of Bitstamp’s IOU services. Michael Nardolillo, a user on He argued: “There is no guarantee that Bitstamp will honor their IOUs?! That’s like saying there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to withdraw your cryptocurrency from an exchange. Bitstamp is highly regulated, IOUs are always redeemable. It is no different than holding assets on an exchange.”
This defense was met with skepticism from Kirjakulov, who drew attention to previous failures in the sector. He replied, “Somewhere, FTX’s creditors did a few facepalms. Again, Stably did not respect the 1:1 conversion. And there is nothing on Bitstamp or even GateHub sources that claims there will be a 1:1 conversion and absolutely nothing of any proof of funding.”
In an attempt to bolster his defense, Nardolillo shared a screenshot of Bitstamp’s website detailing their IOU service. The screenshot shows that users can transfer value on the XRP Ledger via IOUs issued by Bitstamp in exchange for real assets such as BTC, USD, EUR or ETH.
Dr. Kirjakulov highlighted a critical flaw in this arrangement. He said, “And this is the problem. This is the only way you can make this trade. It also says absolutely nothing about 1:1 conversion. What if it deviates by 50%? Will they exchange 1 bUSD (which is worth 50 cents) for 1 USDT (which is worth 1 USD)?”
At the time of writing, the XRP community is awaiting an official response from Bitstamp. XRP was trading at $1.15.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
