Bitcoiners attack Ripple after Strategic Bitcoin Reserve flop
Following Ripple’s successful political activism via Fairshake and its other Washington DC lobbying efforts, its critics are reinvigorated.
After it scored a victory in Donald Trump’s executive order that deprioritized bitcoin (BTC) and emphasized stablecoins like Ripple USD, Bitcoiners have focused their vitriol on the billionaire-led company for allegedly derailing plans for a US National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Leading the attack is Riot Platforms’ Pierre Rochard, a Bitcoin maximalist. Leading the defense is Ripple CTO David Schwartz, who has fired back against Rochard’s claims that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) blockchain is centralized.
Behind them, thousands of the communities’ supporters are rallying support for their causes.
For example, Rochard retweeted a thread describing XRPL as being centrally administered by Ripple Labs. The thread highlights a legal notice from Ripple asserting that it and its logo are trademarked. Rochard went on to make the case that XRP is a differentiated product like Kleenex or Evian, not a commodity like cotton or water.
Schwartz tried to claim that any theoretical trademark on XRP, the native coin of the XRP Ledger, would not be easy to enforce. He also claimed that Ripple does not compensate validators.
Rochard claims that Ripple still has outsized control over the XRP Ledger, including reserving the right to determine which chain would maintain the XRP ticker symbol if a contentious hard fork were to occur. Ripple Labs also doesn’t permit anyone to use its trademarked materials.
Ripple’s Unique Node Lists (UNLs)
Although anyone may run an XRP validator, they have to be included on Unique Node Lists (UNLs) maintained by Ripple and entities with financial ties to Ripple to have influence in the practical validation of XRP Ledger transactions.
According to Rochard, this casts Schwartz’s claim that XRPL is decentralized into doubt since Ripple and associated parties can change the UNLs or refuse to add a new validator. Rochard called this power “a massive conflict of interest.”
Read more: Ripple billionaires’ RLUSD captures less than 0.04% of stablecoin market
For its Initial Coin Offering (ICO), Ripple co-founders pre-mined 100 billion coins and allocated more than half to a small group of insiders and entities that they led. Today, Ripple insiders continue to control or lead entities that control a large percentage of the XRP supply.
Unlike the Bitcoin community, Ripple has pushed for stablecoins like its RLUSD and even its Ripple CBDC Platform for non-USD fiat stablecoins.
Ripple’s USD stablecoin RLUSD launched last month and hasn’t increased in size for weeks. As of publication time, its market capitalization hasn’t increased from its $73 million since CoinGecko started tracking it on December 23, 2024.
For context, RLUSD is less than 0.04% of the stablecoin market.
The animosity between Bitcoin maximalists and Ripple is famous, and the duel between Rochard and Schwartz is just the latest episode in a long history of fights between the two camps.
Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen personally paid millions of dollars for a Change the Code media campaign that attacked Bitcoin’s implementation of proof-of-work.
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