Messari CEO Ryan Selkis Receives Threatening Calls On Publishing Critical Article

By Rishma Banerjee

Crypto platform Messari, headed by Ryan Selkis as CEO had recently published a somewhat critical article about XRP. As a consequence, as per reports, the CEO is now at the end of receiving threatening calls.

As per a recent market report, Ripple sold $129 million worth of XRP in the fourth quarter of 2018.

However, Messari posted a report on the 24th of January, which claimed that XRP’s market capitalisation is incorrect. Messari’s report in fact, say that XRP is overvalued by $6,1 billion. Apparently the company had based its analysis on data from cryptocurrency exchanges and third-party cryptocurrency data services.

Messari writes:

“XRP’s liquid “circulating supply” and “market cap” could be overstated by 48%, which would put total XRP “market cap” at $6.9 billion vs $13.0 billion widely reported at the current USD-XRP exchange rate.”

He also said that they had inquited Ripple about the numbers, but to no avail. They were reportedlywriting the article in hopes that Ripple will approach them. They wrote:

“We have reached out multiple times to Ripple representatives for comment. But we have not yet received a response to our inquiries. We acknowledge that some of the estimates in this report lack precision. But believe they are directionally correct and presented in good faith. We look forward to Ripple’s response, and will update this report accordingly if and when they do reply.”

Following the publication, the CEO and founder of Messari, Ryan Selkis, posted a tweet saying that he received a threatening call from an anonymous caller where the caller said his wife’s birth date and hung up. In a follow up tweet he also said that he will be reporting the incident to the authorities after three calls, in efforts to protect his family.

He also urged several high-ranking employees of Ripple to denounce the threats against his family. He argued this had been committed by the XRP community. The high ranked employees include its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, CTO David Schwartz and SVP of Marketing and Communications Monica Long.

As of yet, no one of the mentioned employees of XRP has made any comment or statement regarding the tweets. While waiting for answers, Selkis went  to the local police station out of worry for his family. After the visit he tweeted once again, saying that it was highly likely that this was the work of a “punk kid”.