A top lawyer at cryptocurrency startup Ripple has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed to CCN on Friday.
Brynly Llyr, who joined the San Francisco-based blockchain company in Nov. 2016 as the firm’s general counsel and has served in that role in the nearly two years since, is no longer with the organization. Llyr’s departure from Ripple was first reported by Quartz.
In a statement, a Ripple spokesperson confirmed the move and said that the blockchain firm was “grateful” for her work at the company.
“We can confirm that Brynly Llyr has moved on from Ripple. We’re grateful to all that she did to help build an incredible team that will continue the work they’ve been focused on for the past year and beyond. We wish Brynly all the best in her next endeavor and the team here at Ripple looks forward to the next chapter where we will continue to pave the way in this ever-evolving and unchartered industry.”
Previously, she had managed “class action litigation and complex litigation” for eBay and also spent time at PayPal after it was spun off from the e-commerce giant, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Llyr’s departure comes as Ripple prepares to defend itself against a variety of class-action lawsuits alleging that the XRP cryptocurrency — whose majority owner is Ripple — should be regulated as a security and that the firm’s distribution of XRP (which is often colloquially referred to as “ripple”) constitutes an illegal securities offering.
The spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about whether Llyr’s departure would have any impact on that legal battle. However as Hacked reported in July, the company has hired a heavyweight to oversee its case that XRP is not a security: Mary Jo White, the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency that determines whether an asset should be regulated as a security by the federal government.
Ripple, for its part, has long denied that XRP is a security. The SEC, meanwhile, has not commented on the matter publicly, though officials have stated that bitcoin and ethereum — the only two cryptocurrencies with circulating valuations higher than those of XRP — should not be classified as securities under current U.S. law.
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