Do you know that there is a way you can own Ripple and collect dividends?
It's true, I've researched and have found a way to get your own piece of a Ripple dividend.
It all goes back to when Ripple was just getting started and needed some cash. It went in search of investors, many of whom are private companies and therefore not investable to you or me. (Ripple is a private company too , which means you can't buy ownership in it) But there were a few companies that are public and pay a dividend that purchased a piece of Ripple.
If you buy shares in these companies, you will not just own XRP but the company behind that coin. When possible, I almost always prefer to own the company.
Why? Well, think of it as a bottle of milk and a cow. You can buy the bottle of milk and maybe sell it for more to someone else, but if you own the cow you can get more milk every day!
So buy the Ripple company, and profit from their future endeavors. Did I mention that Ripple also owns about 60% of the total amount of XRP? So yeah, you get the milk AND the cow by following this strategy.
Here are the four public companies that own a part of Ripple and will pay YOU a dividend to own them.
Seagate Technology LLC (STX) – 4.7% Dividend
Series A and B funder. Estimated ownership of 4.3%
Seagate is in the business of hard drives for storing digital data. With the growth of could storage and hyperscale markets there are plenty of avenues for their products.
In addition to Ripple, they have also made recent venture capital investments into Reduxio, Egnyte, Virident Systems, Cloudscaling, and eASIC
Banco Santander (SAN) – 4.2% Dividend
Like Seagate, Santander invested in both the series A and B. Estimated ownership of 4.3%
Invested $4 million out of $32 million raised in the Series A.
Santander is a bank that mainly operates in Brazil, UK, Spain, Mexico, and Chile – but they are elsewhere too.
They own pieces of iZettle, myCheck, cyanogen, Kabbage, Digital Asset Holdings, Elliptic, SigFig, Socure, PayKey, Tradeshift, Curve, Pixoneye, Gridspace, and ePesos.
SBI Holdings (SBHGF) – 1.2% Dividend
Series B investor. Stated ownership of 10.5%
SBI is a Japanese company that invests in many different companies. It is basically a company that invests in other companies and creates new entities. Recently, they created a special unit to seek out and invest in the best new AI and blockchain companies.
This company invests in so many things, I can't list them all here. Go to their page on CrunchBase to see how many pies they have their fingers in.
CME Group (CME) – 1.7% Dividend
CME is the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace.
Estimated ownership of 5% through CME Ventures.
Also owns a piece of Digital Currency Group which was part of the Angel funding for Ripple labs as well as in the series A.
Also invested in and owns part of 1QBit, CrossLend, Digital Asset Holdings, Dwolla, Filament, iguazio, Nervana, Orbital Insight, Powerlytics, Privitar, SparkCognition, and Wickr.
Also, for the past 7 years this company has paid a special dividend in December. Last year they paid out $3.50 per share. This actually makes the dividend almost 4%.
The Research & Math
I want to mention that except for SBI Holdings, no other company has stated exactly how much of Ripple they own. So that made it a guessing game. I used commonly bought percentages for each round based off my research.
It is said that between 15-50% of a company is sold off during a Series A funding.
Forbes.com states:
When you raise Series A funding, you’ll issue additional shares of stock that will go to your investors, and you can expect those investors to take anywhere from 25% to 50% of the company.
Techcrunch states:
Generally, the valuation range results in the group of Series A investors taking 15-25 percent of the company.
During the series B funding, a further 33% of the company is sold off. From Lawtrades.com:
If you get to the Series B round, expect a dramatically different mindset from earlier funders. Whereas Series A and seed investors believe in your vision and have bought into the prospects of your company, those in Series B want to see that you’ve successfully progressed and satisfied important milestones. They typically see about 33% ownership, which will dilute all previous ownership percentages.
13 companies invested in Ripple's series A funding. So we can estimate that if each company invested the same amount, they would each have purchased nearly 2% of Ripple.
10 companies invested in the series B. If we say that 33% of the company was sold off, then each company purchased 3.3% of Ripple if the investments were an equal amount.
So, if equal, each company that invested in the series A and B would own approximately 5.3% of the company. BUT a series B funding dilutes the previous holders, this images shows that nearly have the ownership percentage is lost to a Series A investor if they don't buy into the series B.
So let's make that a 50% dilution to the series A investors. That means each company would currently own around 4.3%. But SBI Holdings (which only invested in the Series B) says they own 10.5% of Ripple so they obviously invested a higher percentage.
Yeah, it's a mess. So you can see why 3 out of the four companies ownership percentages in Ripple are estimated.
2 Ways To Play This Strategy
1: The first way is to just put 25% in each company. This will give your investment amount an approximate ownership percentage of 6% of Ripple.
You will also collect 3% in annual dividends.
2:The second way would be to go heavy into SBI Holdings since they own the most of Ripple. So that would mean you put 40% into SBI and 20% into each of the rest.
Your investment money would buy 7% of Ripple and get you an annual dividend of 2.6%.
Remember, both ways also include part ownership in EVERYTHING else those companies do and own. That is some MAJOR diversification right there.
You would also get around $3.50 in a special dividend from each full share of CME Group that you hold.
By using this strategy you can buy your way into owning the Ripple cow as well as the 60% of XRP milk it holds.