Ripple (XRPUSD)

[stockvaper]

“XRP is Not Centralized”: Ripple SVP Addresses Crypto Community Criticism
Marcus Treacher addresses concerns of XRP centralization and explains Ripple's growth strategy.

"It may be for most people that 2020 hasn’t been the best year so far. With the rise of the coronavirus and the resulting economic crisis that has put the entire global financial system in jeopardy, this year hasn’t exactly proved to be a walk in the park on a sunny day–at least, not without a medical-grade face mask, and only if the path through the park happens to be the most direct way to reach the grocery store or the pharmacy.

However, the year hasn’t been all bad for everyone. Last month, Forbes named settlements system and remittance giant Ripple as the second-largest fintech firm in the US, just behind Stripe (valued at $35 billion), a payment processing firm based in San Francisco. Coinbase (valued at $8.1 billion) was in third place.

The ranking was considered to be particularly significant because of Ripple’s status as a company that deals in blockchain, which is still largely considered to be a frontier technology.

Marcus Treacher, senior vice president of customer success at Ripple, told Finance Magnates that Ripple’s growth has much to do with the company’s concentration of tapping into the market for international transaction infrastructure: “a large part of our success has been to not lose focus on solving a specific problem around cross border payments,” he said–particularly, the global remittance market.

Indeed, Treacher explained that “Ripple is the only blockchain company with customers using its products commercially for cross-border payments.”

The company’s focus on this particular area has “allowed us to be at the front of technical innovations that use the power of blockchain and digital assets–technologies that have proven really effective in addressing the inefficiencies of the global remittance market and where our customers are already seeing huge benefits,” Treacher said.

“XRP is not centralized.”

However, the company’s journey forward has not gone unmet with its fair share of criticism. Ripple has been widely criticized within the cryptocurrency community for being “too centralized”; critics have alleged that Ripple holds too large a share of XRP, its native token, and have pointed to reports that, for example, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb has sold a billion XRP and still controls roughly 5 percent of the token supply.


Laura Shin
?
@laurashin
“Ripple is highly centralized & XRP is more akin to a PayPal account than a trustless system like bitcoin.... It's hard to come up w any rational reason why XRP exists in the Ripple protocol, other than as a means for Ripple to make money. Lots of money.“ https://www.coindesk.com/ripples-xrp-giving-third-largest-cryptocurrency-second-look/ …



What of these claims?

“XRP is not centralized,” Treacher commented, matter-of-factly. “It’s a decentralized, open-source digital asset, and the XRP Ledger is based on an inherently decentralized, democratic, consensus mechanism — meaning no one party can control it, not even Ripple.”

Additionally, “Ripple is a stakeholder of XRP thus is an interested party in its success,” Treacher continued. Therefore, in his view, “it wouldn’t be logical as a business to disrupt the XRP Ledger or XRP.”

Treacher also pointed to the fact that “the XRP held by Ripple is locked in cryptographically-secure escrow accounts in which one billion XRP is released to Ripple each month. This provides an upper limit on the amount of new XRP that can be brought into circulation, and any additional XRP leftover each month is placed into a new escrow.”

“Deletable Accounts” feature would be “beneficial to account holders who would like to recover XRP reserves from unused accounts.”
Some crypto community members have also expressed concerns over “Deletable Accounts”, a feature that would allow “[allow] XRPL (XRP ledger) accounts to be removed from the ledger and recover most of the reserve locked in the accounts for spam prevention.”

Shortly after the proposal was made, Bitcoinist reporter Christina Comben called the proposed feature “disturbingly centralized at best, horribly over-controlling at worst.”

However, Treacher explained that the feature, which would indeed “make it possible to completely remove an account from the ledger and recover the majority of the reserve from that account” is a positive thing for the XRP ecosystem.

“This is beneficial to account holders who would like to recover XRP reserves from unused accounts,” Treacher said. “This will help benefit the network by freeing up space on the ledger to ensure the XRP Ledger continues to experience high performance and speed without downtime.”

Additionally, there’s no guarantee that the measure will be passed: “as the XRP Ledger follows a consensus protocol to ensure any changes to the ledger are first approved by 80% of its participants,” Treacher explained. “The ‘deletable accounts’ feature is still being considered and won’t go into effect until the amendment achieves 80% support for two weeks.”
https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/interview/xrp-is-not-centralized-ripple-svp-addresses-crypto-community-criticism/