David Schwartz, Ripple CTO says it’s just an attempt to “get clicks” on the “PR Stunt” by leveraging XRP’s name More than $400 million worth of XRP are traced back to illegal activities, with a large portion of it to Ponzi schemes and scams, Elliptic, a blockchain analytics startup said in its report, released Wednesday.

Though $400 million seem like a huge amount, it represents just 0.2% of XRP transactions and less than $829 million of Bitcoin, which is 0.5% of the network's transactions and dark market-related. This could be because of XRP’s popularity among retail users. Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of Elliptic told media,

“I suspect there are a lot of retail holders of XRP, which may be an attractive target for scammers.”

The UK-based start up announced that it can now track the XRP transactions, making it the 12th digital asset the firm now supports. Its competitor Chainalysis is also planning to add support for XRP soon as well.

Also, the relatively small amount of XRP used for illicit purposes might be because of the company's association with traditional banks. Robinson said,

“Regardless of the amount, it just demonstrates that there is illicit activity going on in this coin,”

“Therefore, if you are a business handling some of these transactions then you need to be checking for it because you don't want to be the organization that's being used to launder those proceeds.”

However, highlighting this activity will improve the network as having clarity of “where it’s been happening should give banks comfort rather than a cause for concern.”

“Sensationalizing” the Context?

This could be a bit concerning as XRP’s target market is the regulated financial institutions. The distributed ledger technology startup markets its software leveraging XRP to banks and financial institutions. A Ripple spokesperson said,

“Like other cryptocurrencies, XRP is open source and decentralized – it’s available to anyone to use. Ripple enabled XRP transactions are secure and through regulated institutions.”

Flattering as it is that people are leveraging XRP’s name to get clicks on their press release, it’s honestly just annoying when they sensationalize it, taking it completely out of context. https://t.co/2OphEKVL97

— David Schwartz (@JoelKatz) November 21, 2019

XRP community also comes in defence, calling out that cash is used for illegal activities more than anything along with Internet and other number of things.

The support for XRP has been on customer demand and its high exchange trading volumes further made it the next digital asset on Elliptic. Currently, the XRP monitoring solution is in beta testing and will be officially released in early December.

Elliptic recently raised a $23 million Series B led by Ripple partner SBI Holdings to expand into Asia, a popular market for XRP. At that time, Tomoyuki Ni, executive officer for overseas investment at SBI Investment said they went with Elliptic because it is the best option when it comes to tracking XRP. Also, in the coming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, people will be able to use XRP in a secure way, protected by Elliptic.