Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, turned to Twitter to deny recent allegations by Crypto Leaks, a website that specializes in reporting corruption and fraud in the cryptocurrency industry.
On Friday, Crypto Leaks released a report that detailed the discovery of several short films from an anonymous source. According to the article, Ava Labs and the law firm forged a secret deal to “target and ruin crypto groups” by using the American legal system in a “gangster way.”
Furthermore, the same story claimed that Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse had bankrolled a legal firm to go after rival businesses. The article says that Roche, who started Roche Freedman, used to work for Boies Schiller Flexner, the law firm helping Ripple in its case against the US SEC.
Ripple’s CEO refutes speaking with Kyle Roche
“For whatever reasons Brad Garlinghouse invested in Kyle Roche and supported him on his current path, it certainly didn’t save him from the SEC,” the article claims.
The Ripple CEO took to Twitter to deny any such allegations and claimed that he had “never met or spoken to (much less invested in) Kyle Roche.”
Ava Lab’s response to the allegation
In response to the claims, Emin Gün Sirer, the founder of Ava Labs, called them a “ridiculous conspiracy theory.” Sirer said that the company would never do anything illegal like that.
“How could anyone believe something so ridiculous as the conspiracy theory nonsense on Cryptoleaks? We would never engage in the unlawful, unethical, and just plain wrong behavior claimed in these self-serving videos and inflammatory articles. Our tech and team speak for themselves.”
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a now-deleted tweet that the charges were “wild,” leaving open the potential that the videos were deep fakes. Notably, Crypto Leaks says that Roche Freedman just sued Binance.US for the collapse of the Terra ecosystem at the request of Ava Labs.
Even though there is no public record of Ava Labs and Roche Freedman working together, both the founders of Ava Labs and the company’s official Twitter account follow the law firm. Also, in 2019, Sirer praised Roche Freedman for suing Tether and Bitfinex in a tweet.
