New Payments Platform Australia (NPPA), a consortium that includes every significant bank in Australia, is accusing Ripple of intellectual property infringement over the branding of Ripple’s ‘PayID’ payment standard. The details about the lawsuit have not been public yet, but it was reported that the operators of Australia’s interbank payments network ‘Pay ID’ had filed a suit with the Federal Court of Australia against Ripple Labs Inc. NPPA’s payment platform allows users to instantly send and receive money 24/7 using an email address or phone number.
NPPA secured the trademark rights for ‘Pay ID in 2017.
More than 60 Australian banks currently use NPPA. Most crypto exchanges in the country accept fiat via PayID, including Independent Reserve and BTC Markets, two members of Ripple’s Open Payments Coalition, which indicates that Ripple may well have been aware of the Australian PayID brand. The NPPA is mutually owned by 13 banks, including major institutions ANZ, HSBC, Citi, and the Reserve Bank of Australia. The blockchain payment giant Ripple filed for two ‘PayID’ trademarks with the US Patent and Trademark Office on June 17, 2020. NPPA had filed another application for the same trademark in Australia on July 24, 2020.
NPP Australia — the operator of the New Payments Platform — appears to be suing Ripple Labs in an IP case pic.twitter.com/JLfWsySzI8
— Rohan Pearce (@rohan_p) August 24, 2020
“XRP is not competing with CBDCs.”
Earlier, the senior director of global operations at Ripple, Emi Yoshikawa, claimed that XRP does not compete either with central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or stablecoins. Yoshikawa said that XRP is complementary to the global progress in CBDC and stablecoin development. “There are various types of crypto assets, but I think that the role of XRP as a bridge asset in international settlements, and is not competing with stablecoins or CBDC,” she said. XRP’s role is not to compete with stablecoins or CBDC, but on the contrary, it is complementary to them, Ripple executive said.
