According to Hogan, if $XRP werea security, its price should be correlated with Ripple’s actions and not with the performance of other cryptocurrencies.
The attorney says the correlation with other crypto assets is likely “Ripple’s strongest defense” in their lawsuit with the top regulator.
The legal expert points to a research paper from 2018 by Andrew Burnie of the Alan Turing Institute that outlines how the price of various cryptocurrencies correlate with each other. According to the paper, $XRP is correlated to ADA by a factor of over 70%.
“As you are aware, the SEC has to prove that $XRP is a security, and one thing it will have to show is that its retail purchasers – me and you – are looking to Ripple to increase the value of $XRP, and what this paper shows is that the price of $XRP is not really correlated to anything Ripple does. In other words, Ripple ended its partnership agreement, for example, on March 9th with Moneygram and nothing happened to $XRP’s price. However, according to this research paper, the price of $XRP is heavily correlated with Cardano. 71% correlated according to the experts… Ripple has briefly touched on this part of their defense, but this is the first time I’ve seen that it correlates so strongly with Cardano. Very interesting.
Ripple can announce a great business deal, the $XRP price won’t budge much. But if the price of Cardano falls 10%, you’d expect to see the price of $XRP fall 7.1%. That is not how a security acts. I really hope that Ripple has good expert witnesses lined up and statistical correlation.”