Ripple opens office in Canada as looking for new HQ in the works
Ripple, the San Francisco-based fintech company, continues to consider alternative locations for its business amid ongoing regulatory woes in the US over its cryptocurrency.
Ripple has established a new regional office in the city of Toronto, Canada to support its growth in North America and beyond. The Toronto office plans to initially hire 50 engineers, but will ultimately expand to hundreds of blockchain talents across other functions like applied machine learning scientists, data scientists, and product managers.
“Nearly every financial institution is coming up with its crypto strategy to take advantage of this technology that will underpin our future global financial systems. Crypto is one of the most thrilling industries to work in, so it’s no surprise that talent is leaving tech incumbents and traditional finance to enter this space. We are continuing to scale and invest in our business by expanding our presence globally with our first office in Toronto,” says Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple.
Devraj Varadhan, SVP of Engineering at Ripple, also added: “We are excited to tap into Toronto’s technical talent pool and add builders to address the unmet customer needs on behalf of global customers – our teams here will play a key role in driving Ripple’s innovations, ranging from blockchain protocol development and decentralized applications to machine learning and payment solutions.”
Ontario takes actions against Bybit and KuCoin
The announcement comes after the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) banned crypto exchange KuCoin from operating in Canada following securities violations. The provincial regulator had also reached a $1.9 million settlement agreement with Bybit, which agreed to work with the agency to properly register.
Ripple CEO said last year that the company is considering a move away from its home base in San Francisco amid regulatory quagmire around its XRP token. However, there is no indication yet from the $10 billion fintech company that such a move is going ahead soon.
Ripple is yet to decide where to pick up its new mother base, but the firm has already set up a regional headquarter in Dubai. The move means things are shifting for Ripple’s MENA business into a higher gear. RippleNet, which already has attracted over 300 financial institutions, has signed an existing roster of financial institutions and money transfer companies.
The MENA region is home to two of the top three remittance corridors in the world, namely Saudi Arabia and United Arab. The two countries had $78 billion in remittances in 2020.
